


Running Up That Hill

by crinklefries



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, But with a payoff??, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), In a very roundabout way, It gets dark, Jotun AU, Jotunheim Won the War, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Jotunn Thor (Marvel), Jotunn | Frost Giant, Jötunheimr | Jotunheim, M/M, Magical Tattoos, Mirrorverse AU, OKAY LISTEN a lot happens in this fic, Past Violence, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tattoos, Thorki Secret Santa 2018, Violence, infinity war fix-it, there are scars and there are memories and at the heart of it all is Thor and Loki, yep this is a Jotun Mirrorverse AU surprise!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 10:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17242232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: Six, Loki thinks. He unlocks six memories and understands himself better for it, but it does not cure what makes him ache. He is here, in a world not his own, surrounded by people who could be his, if he belonged.It is funny, in a way. In his other life, he had been a frost giant caught in a world of Asgardians and here, he is an Asgardian caught in a world of Jotun.(or; Loki dies in Infinity War and wakes up in Jotunheim with no memories. he doesn't remember his past, but his memories are inked across his skin. what he can't remember, Thor will help unlock.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacehussy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehussy/gifts).



> HAPPY HOLIDAYS (kinda), [spacehussy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehussy/pseuds/spacehussy), I was your Secret Thorki Santa! I want to explain this fic--one of your requests was "tattoo/branding/scarification." I saw that and thought, cool! I can make something of this. What if I take this and did a memory exploration? Also, what if I made it SAD? 
> 
> And then I panicked that you would hate it and this wasn't what you asked for at all and so I stalked your Tumblr and found that you love Mirrorverse AUs a lot? I don't know if this is a proper Mirrorverse AU, but I tried!
> 
> So my apologies, this whole thing got away from me, but I still hope it's something that you'll be able to enjoy! It's definitely out of the ordinary, as far as fic goes, but I think it does what I wanted it to do, which is show that these two idiots are for each other, no matter the time, no matter the place, no matter the context. ♥
> 
> Thank you also to thorki twitter and, in particular, [ravenbringslight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenbringslight/pseuds/ravenbringslight) and [seidrade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seidrade) for being so helpful with tattoo ideas + Norse runeology! I appreciate it and you!

**before.**

a hand at his throat, his legs scrabbling out beneath him. his lungs reach for air, one last desperate gasp, and find none.

he looks over and finds a pair of eyes, one he’s known all of the long years of his life. they’re broken, those eyes. they’ve seen the destruction of everything they once loved; have lost everything they once had; and now stand to lose everything more.  
  
in the next life, he thinks, it will be different.

in the next life, i will not destroy everything i love.

his breaths slow, his limbs hanging heavy.

in the distance is a cry, but the sounds are already breaking on distant shores.

regret is what he feels.

his brother is the last thing he remembers.

**

 **now.**  
  
He awakens with a breath of life and the color blue.

**

“I would not move so hastily, your highness,” a soft voice comes from his side.

He turns his head and realizes he’s halfway out of bed, bandages wrapped around his middle, his throat throbbing, his skin bare and pale.

A hand comes and rests on his wrist and he looks up this time, at a kind face, wreathed in blue. In fact, all of her is blue, from her forehead down to her chest, her blue hand curled around his white wrist. Slowly, under her attention, it leeches onto his skin too, not a deeper blue, like hers, but something a little lighter, like her color is mixing with his own.

He seeks out her red eyes questioningly, her brown hair pulled back into braids piled on top of her head, and she frowns.

“Tell me your name,” the woman prompts and he—

He doesn’t know.

He opens his mouth and closes it, hand closing around the woman’s own wrist. He grips it tight, too tight, and a wince flickers across her face.

“Your name is Prince Loki,” the woman says. “You come from Asgard.”

Prince Loki, he thinks, turning the name over in his head.

Asgard. He doesn’t know what that is, but it feels right, like a truth notching into his chest.

“And who are you?” he asks, fingers still tight around her blue skin.

“Eir,” she says. “I am a healer. You do not remember me?”

Loki does not. He looks around them, at the walls crawling with ice, the black sky outside. It looks unfamiliar to him. It does not feel right.

“Where am I?” he asks the blue woman. “Eir?”

Eir keeps her face carefully neutral, but Loki does not miss the concern that creases in between her red eyes.

“Jotunheim, your highness,” Eir says. “Asgard fell and you were captured in the war.”

Loki’s breathing comes up shallow, a feeling he can’t quite verbalize, although it sits in his chest, tight and paralyzing.

“When was that?” Loki asks. He looks around him again and he can see it now, carved into the very room they’re in; the sweeping creations of the frost giants, magnificent and so very cold.

Eir’s mouth thins into a line that nearly disappears. She tries to free her hand and Loki lets go. It’s like an anchor that’s pulled away.

“Two hundred years ago,” Eir says.

Loki’s head spins.

“I am Prince Loki of Asgard,” he whispers.

“You were,” Eir replies and looks at him if not sadly, then with worry. Her blue hand cups the cool, light blue of his cheek. “Two hundred years ago. You are Prince Loki of Jotunheim now.”

Loki doesn’t remember it. He doesn’t remember _any_ of it.

But he does feel it, like lead in the pit of his stomach.

It’s wrong. All of it is very wrong.

**

Eir touches the hollow between his collarbone, lets her seidr bury deep into his skin, helping soothe the bruises there, if not heal them entirely.

“How did I get these?” Loki asks, staring at his reflection in an ice crystal. He touches the throat, the mottled, purple splotches among the light, powder blue, tender to the touch.

“I do not know, your highness,” Eir says. “You were gone for months and when he found you, your body was broken and covered in bruises in the forest.”

Loki pulls his hand away.

“It has taken most of my magic to return you from the dead, Prince Loki,” Eir says. She straightens from her place at his side. “Whatever happened to you—whatever caused this, it was not the doing of a lesser creature.”

Loki looks at his hands, the lines on his palms, and then at his wrists, narrow, light blue, and winding with marks. On his left wrist in particular is inked a dark vine that wraps around his wrist, crawls up the side of his arm, and ends at the joint of his elbow in a leaf with sharp edges. A scar slashes across the base of the vine, just below his palm, stretching from one side of his wrist to the other, thick in the middle and thinning to points at the end.

“You have always had those,” Eir says, watching him look at his body as though he’s a stranger to it.

“I do not remember them,” Loki says.

“They will come back to you,” Eir says with some confidence. She gathers the extra wrappings and bandages into her arms and turns toward an ice shelf jutting out from the nearest wall. It has more shelves above and below it and drawers made of crystal. She puts the supplies into one of them.

Loki feels strange, like he is both himself and another person altogether.

He wishes he could remember _anything_.

He gets up from the bed, slowly this time, and Eir hands him a fur cape to put about his shoulders.

“Oh,” he says, blinking. “I was expecting a tunic.”

“You have not worn a tunic in two hundred years,” Eir says with a small smile. She smooths the fur carefully and steps back. “This suits you, your highness.”

“Jotunheim?” he asks.

“All of it,” she says. “You will remember soon enough and then it will not be so scary.”

Loki doesn’t know about that, but he cannot stay in this infirmary any longer. He turns to leave and Eir doesn’t stop him.

Halfway out the door, he turns back to her.

“Eir,” he says. “Who found me?”

“What’s that?” the Jotun healer asks him.

“You said I was found in the forest by someone,” Loki says. “My body was brought back. Who was it?”

“Ah,” Eir says and with a careful smile—careful, too careful, she says, “Prince Thor, of course.”

Loki frowns, although he doesn’t know why.

“Ah,” he says. “Of course.”

He turns and leaves quickly.

  
Prince Thor, he thinks. I don’t remember him either.

**

The crystalline structure of the Jotunheim palace is large and open, with clear hallways of stone and ice, and staircases that wind their way up multiple floors. At intervals, there are torches, not of fire, but of a bright, white light that is closer to starlight than to flame. Loki watches one at the foot of a staircase that a servant has told him will lead him to his quarters. The light flickers as he puts a hand forward, cold to touch, like a gust of chill wind against his palm.

He bites his lip and tries to remember if this feels familiar; if any of this holds a place in his memories. He takes a frustrated breath and tries to brush the light again when a loud, harsh horn echoes through the halls.

Startled, Loki pulls his hand back and presses himself against the wall. His heart beats rapidly, the sound echoing in his head, as though he’s been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to, somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

He stays close to the wall until the echoing fades and then he shoves himself off of the ice and sprints up the stairs.  
  
  
Loki winds his way through the ice hallways, the soles of leather-clad feet surprisingly warm and quiet against the cold ground.

The gaping archways let freezing air flicker in as he passes them and when he looks out, he can see the eternity of stars and other realms spread out before him.

He pauses as he passes one archway, a glittering catching his eye from somewhere beyond. He pauses, scared to chase it and too curious to not. Ultimately, Loki plods closer to the edge, looking up at the sky above him.

Spread around him are the bright whites of the stars, the dense swirls of galaxies, and faint pinpricks of what could be planets, he assumes. He feels a pull to them in a strange way, like his home is somewhere he can no longer place. If he is to believe what Eir said, then he supposes that it is true.

He imagines a realm so golden that it glitters against the bottomless black sky. It would have valleys and mountains of molten golden, a palace made of glimmering spires, and the deep blue of water running through canals and out into the sea. It would have shrubs that bloomed white and red with flowers that would open at his touch and trees that would carry apples, golden ones that he could not pick except on the rarest of occasions.

It would have a bridge, large and made of all of the colors of the rainbow.

Loki pauses at the archway, hand on the ice, eyes scanning the universe for such a bridge.

He does not find it.  
  
He feels the loss of it in his gut, a gaping sort of loneliness.  
  
He shakes his head and turns to leave, but there it is again—the glittering.

Loki turns his face down and it’s only then that he realizes it isn’t something, but a someone.

By a frozen fountain in the courtyard, wreathed in the glow of white lights stands a man of blue. He is large, this man; tall, broad in the chest and in the shoulders, muscles rippling down his arms and his torso to thick thighs that are clad in the straps of leather shoes. The man has a fur, similar to Loki’s, about his shoulders and a skirt of leather about his waist. He has golden hair that is pulled back, a beard that covers his face and is braided into two sections at the bottom. His arms are bound in leather. There are markings all over his torso.

His eyes, as he catches Loki’s eyes, are red.

Loki freezes in the man’s gaze. It burns both cold and hot at once, as though he knows Loki in more ways than Loki remembers himself.  
  
The man shifts his body and the glittering appears again. It is only then that Loki understands. The lights floating in the air are reflecting off of metal discs at his chest and whatever weapons that are bound at his waist.

The man is dangerous. Loki cannot remember anything, but this he feels with certainty.

The man does not break his gaze. He shifts again and then opens his mouth.

Loki’s heart thuds in his chest, his nerves ratcheting higher and higher until he cannot breathe from it. He stumbles back this time.

Before the man can say anything, he flees.

**

He does not see the man again, but he sees the others. He walks through the halls of the palace in a confused trance, tracing staircases and staring at tapestries, as though they will tell him something— _anything_. He has servants who bow to him and wince every time he opens his mouth. They tell him he can take meals in his chambers or join the others in the hall.

Only once does he choose to leave his chambers.

He meets a Jotun with blond hair and a pointed beard named Fandral and a Jotun woman with an axe strapped to her back. Her name is Sif and she glares at Loki as though he’s caused her some offense.

“You’re different, Prince Loki,” Fandral says after the third course, when he is deep into his frozen ale and Loki hasn’t said a word.

His eyes dart around the hall, trying to find something or _someone_ he recognizes. His mind keeps drawing blank and the uneasiness does not go away. Something does not feel right, although Loki does not know what. It’s as though everything he is seeing is some kind of a mirage, ghost images laid on top of the images that should really be there. This is reality, but it does not feel like it.

He eats a piece of fish and imagines it to be boar.

He does not know why.

He feels dizzy.  
  
“Prince Thor seeks you,” the lady Sif says as she rips flesh from the fish on the plate in front of her.

“Are you ignoring Thor?” Fandral asks and picks his teeth with a fish bone. “Are you fighting again? You know what happened last time you fought—”

“He has never liked me,” Loki says, although he’s not sure why. He frowns and touches his head.

“That’s at least true,” Fandral says with a shrug. Then he frowns too. “Are you all right, Loki?”

Loki feels his anxiety pounding his chest, his vision blurring in front of him.

“Perhaps you need to see the witch,” Sif says with a shrug.

Loki turns toward her.

“The witch?” he asks.

“The witch of Galdhøpiggen” Sif says. “She is known to cast curses and cure them. Perhaps she can help with whatever ails you.”

Loki can’t tell her that what ails him is that he has no idea who he is or why that might be. Still, it is good advice. He manages to finish his food and goes back to his quarters immediately after.

“Find me a map of the mountains,” he tells his servant and she scurries away for fear of incurring his wrath.

**

Galdhøpiggen is the highest mountain in Jotunheim, a peak at the heart of the great Jotun mountain range.

“There is a legend,” Fandral says to him as they look at the maps in Loki’s chamber. “The witch used to be greatly in favor once, but she tried to take the heart of Jotunheim for herself. Laufey banished her to the mountains for her treachery and she has lived there ever since, planning her revenge.”

“Who is she?” Loki asks, tracing the lines on the map. “How can she help?”

“She has great powers,” Sif says lazily. She’s stretched out across a chaise, her fur wracked up, exposing a long expanse of bare blue leg. “She could cut out your heart and swallow it, but heal you all the same.”

Fandral pauses, reaching for a bottle of liquor.

“Is that worth it?” he asks.

Sif raises an eyebrow at Loki.

“I don’t know,” she says knowingly. “Is it?”

Loki looks at the map again and tries out the Jotun words on his tongue. Not a one of them are familiar and, what’s more, they all pull at him the same way as everything around him, as though there is something wrong with them; as though they should not exist.

“Yes,” Loki says, with as much confidence as he can muster. “I will go see the witch.”  
  
  
Only Fandral and Sif know where he is going, which is fine by Loki. He prepares his own pack of food and warm clothing, water and a blanket. He hides knives into the straps that curve around him and carries the map at his waist.

Loki is nervous, but he knows as much about this witch as he does about anything here, so he does not linger.

He slides through the ice palace like a ghost.

When he is to the stables, one hand on the rein to his horse, he looks back and sees someone coming across the yard.

It takes him only a moment to recognize that blond hair, the broad stretch of muscle.

It makes Loki feel queer, panicked. His heart stumbles in his chest.

“Loki—” the man calls, but Loki does not give him a chance to catch him.

Panicked, he digs his heels into the horse’s side and peels out of the gates.

**

The journey to Galdhøpiggen is not easy, but it is not difficult either. Loki discovers things he did not know about himself; such as that he can weather cold temperatures quite well and go for hours without water. His stamina is great and his wit sharp. He comes across obstacles and dead ends and his mind tricks out ways around them. When he stays at villages along the way, he is able to spin stories out of thin air. He takes a liking to this, storytelling and trickery. He only uses it for good, but it warms his chest, like a piece of him that is missing.

All of him is missing, is what he realizes during his days alone. He does not know who or what he is and all he has to remember of what came before are the purple splotches around his neck. He does not know how he got them, but they remain bright and ugly anyway.

He explores his body as he ascends the mountain.

Loki feels strong, if lean, and he does seem to be both of these things. Every frost giant he meets is larger than him, but he can kill a rabbit by snapping its neck with his bare hands. Twice, he overcomes bandits who try to mug him, surprised as they are at his natural talents with knives. He kills one of them and only feels a little bad.

He wonders if he was a great warrior before he lost his memories. He wonders if this is how he got his scars.

  
It takes Loki almost a full moon to reach Galdhøpiggen. He can tell he is nearly at the crest not from the thinning of the air, but from the heaviness of it. There is something here that makes the air grow thick and the sky light. The higher he goes, the more of the universe he can see. He stops at a thawing lake to fill his water skin and pick a flower that glows gold.

The lake thins into a river, which Loki follows up. The river is wreathed in glowing fireflies. They look like sparkling stars that he might catch.

Loki puts his hand out, tries to do so, but they fly away almost immediately. They twinkle at him, taunting him toward, and he follows.

  
The river leads him to the mouth of an enormous cavern and it is only then that he notices someone standing on an outcropping of rock. It is a woman in a long blue dress, a hood laying in the middle of her back. Her hair is spun golden, braids piled at the back of her head.

“Are you the witch?” Loki asks, his heart in his throat. “The witch of Galdhøpiggen?”

The witch continues to stare out into the universe. Then she turns, with a smile.

“Prince Loki,” she says. “I have been waiting for you.”

“How did you know I was to come?” Loki asks slowly.

“The stars told me,” she says. “The stars can hide nothing from a witch.”

Loki swallows. His eyes trace her face. Her skin is white.

“Am I a witch too?” he asks. He remembers waking up, the difference in his color from Eir’s. He is blue now, but he was not then.

The witch smiles.

“Sometimes,” she says. “Come, bathe in Galdhøpiggen’s waters.”

“What may I call you?” Loki asks, slowly lowering the pack from his back and stepping after her.

He trusts her and he does not know why. Only she does not seem wrong in this very strange world.

The witch smiles at him and offers him her hand.

“You may call me Frigga.”

  
Loki strips out of his furs and lowers himself into a shallow pool of water that comes up to his waist. It looks cool to the touch, but when he steps in, the water warms, heated ripples sliding over his blue skin. The longer he stays here the bluer his skin turns, almost as though it’s leeching magic from the air and staining him with it.

The fireflies float around him and he tries to catch one again, but it darts away. Then another one comes and lands on his shoulder. Soon, the entire lake is lit with them, spots of light reflecting across the dark surface.

Loki sees his reflection, his black hair laying in waves across his shoulders. There are hard ridges on his body, black ink spread across in various designs. Two horns curve up at his forehead. His eyes are green. Not red; green.

“What am I?” Loki asks when Frigga returns.

She has a bowl with bright liquid shining inside. She brings it to him, the long sleeves of her robes trailing on the ground. They should be dirty, but they’re clean. She glows as though with magic.

“This will tell us,” she says. “Drink.”

Loki looks at the bowl. She has ground some flowers into it. The gold liquid is stained blue.

“Are you poisoning me, witch?” Loki asks with a frown.

Frigga smiles.

“Drink,” she says.

  
It tastes cool and sweet in his mouth, like a draught made fresh to quench a thirst he’s had for years.

Loki looks up at Frigga. She sets the bowl down and offers him both of her hands, palms up.

Loki feels queer, nervous even. He places his palms on top of hers.

Frigga’s eyes glow a deep, terrible golden.

She’s a Seer and a witch, Loki realizes with a start.

She’s the most powerful being in a world of powerful beings.

He shivers.

  
Loki’s own body glows golden as they touch. At first he thinks it’s everywhere, but then he realizes it’s not.

Frigga realizes this too.

“Oh,” she says. Then she smiles, maybe a little sadly. “It’s written all over you. You have carved and inked it into your skin.”

“What?” Loki asks, his heart beating loudly in his ears.

“Your past, Loki,” Frigga says. “All of it.”

 

 

**  
  
one.**

Loki looks at his reflection in the lake. It’s like silver glass, reflecting him back to himself and making his image clearer.

There are the vines that wrap around his wrist and end in a sharp leaf near his elbow. There’s a small sun inked into the soft place under his right ear. There are thick black lines that bite into his skin just above his ribcage on the left side, almost as though someone took claws to it.

He can see things inked onto his back and under his arms and at his collarbones. All over his bare body are signs of someone else—thick scars and Jotun ridges and black, black ink tattooed across the planes of his frost giant skin.

“What do you hold?” he asks his reflection. “Why did I do this?”

And then, softer.

“How do I read what you have to say?”

  
Loki sits on the ground by a fire Frigga crafted from thin air. His fur is about his shoulders, his long, dark hair braided to the side. His legs are crossed, leather stretched across his lap.

Frigga gives him another bowl, but this is of a witch stew.

“You have locked all of your memories onto you,” Frigga says to him. “It is powerful magic. You must have been a powerful witch.”

Loki shivers a little at the thought. He eats his stew.

“How do I—unlock it?” he asks, looking at her. “How do I remember all I have forgotten?”

Frigga looks at him thoughtfully.

“Strong magic requires a strong anchor,” she says. “Whatever it is that anchored these memories to you, only it will release them.”

Loki doesn’t know what that means. He looks down at his bowl in frustration. The ink stains his body, crawls all over it. He doesn’t know what they mean.

  
How, then, can he know what his anchors are?

**

Loki rests for two more moons. The witch Frigga makes for a good companion in that time. He follows her during her daily rounds and finds she is less a terrifying witch and more a maternal one. She is a mother to the creatures around her. Her seidr weaves powerful, magic spells and she teaches them to Loki. Under her guidance, he learns.

He learns to make healing draughts and memorize complex incantations. He learns to speak with the creatures around them and call on the spirit of the universe for help. He learns the lore of the Norns and feels the power of Yggdrasil pulsing in them, through them, all around them.

He and Frigga speak. She was a great queen once, he learns. A queen from elsewhere, although she does not say where.

“Power is tempting, but fleeting,” Frigga tells him, cupping his face. “Remember that, my prince.”

  
Loki looks at his reflection in the enchanted lake. Every time he sees his face, it grows more handsome, more knowledgeable. It does not, however, reflect any awareness of self. His memories remain elusive. He does not know _who_ Loki of Jotunheim is, and it makes him uneasy.

The purple at his neck remains, as ever, vibrant and angry.

  
Sometimes at night, he feels a hand around his throat and he wakes up, strangling on air.

  
He makes his pack after the second moon rises, ready to brace himself against the forest to return to the palace.

“Whatever my anchors are, they are not here,” Loki says.

“Give me your hand,” Frigga says with a smile. “I wish to give you a blessing.”

Loki adjusts the pack on his back and moves forward.

Spending two moons with the witch has made him think differently on her. She is still the most powerful being he has ever felt and seen, but she is no longer terrifying. She is funny and intelligent, wise and charming. She treats him with respect and teaches him her magic, though she has no reason to; though he does not know who he is.

She smells like mountain sky and juniper branches. The air around her feels heavy, warm with her seidr.

Loki loves her very much.

Frigga’s smile softens and she kisses Loki’s cheek.

“I bless you,” she says. “May the power of Yggdrasil and the goodwill of the Three carry you toward what you seek.”

She offers him her hands, palms up, and once again, he places his down on top. Both of their hands glow a bright gold, their arms laced together with intricate, spiraling lattices of living magic. Frigga shifts her palms and one of her thumbs grazes the thick scar that cuts across the inked vine at Loki’s wrist.

It takes him suddenly.

Loki’s body freezes, his head swirling as with a mist.

That is when it happens.

*

They’re playing by the river when Thor has a great idea. Loki is up to his small knees in mud, frowning as he tries to catch the fish. They’re small and silver, darting between his legs faster than he can splash his hands into the water to scoop them up. He likes the feel of the fish against his skin. They’re small, with smaller mouths. When they nibble at him it tickles and he giggles.

“What?” he asks.

He’s only a few hundred years old; a child. Thor is a few hundred years older, but not _old._ Thor is his big brother and he’s really annoying sometimes, but not most of the time. Most of the time he plays with Loki, runs around the palace grounds screaming with him and crawls into his bed when it’s storming outside and Loki becomes frightened. Thor is his big brother and his very best friend.

Loki tucks his curls back behind his little ears. He forgets that his hands are wet, so water gets everywhere.

“D’you know what Heimdall told me?” Thor asks and scoots closer. He’s already caught a fish and let it go. The thrill had lasted maybe five minutes, maybe ten. He’s already bored, stretching his arms above his head.

“What?” Loki asks. He darts his hand forward again, but the fish is faster than him. It’s gone before he’s even made a splash. “Ugh!”

“There’s a tree,” Thor says. “In Idunn’s orchard. It grows tall and the leaves are large and spiky.”

“Okay?” Loki is confused why he should care about a tree.

“The tree grows golden apples!” Thor says.

Loki stops searching for his next fish and looks up at Thor.

“Golden?” he asks.

“Yeah!” Thor exclaims.

“Apples are not golden, Thor,” Loki says, rolling his eyes.

“These are!” Thor insists. “And when you bite into them, you live _forever_.”

“That’s a long time,” Loki says dubiously. He doesn’t know about all that.

Thor gives up on splashing in the water and grabs Loki’s wrist, drags him onto the dry land while he complains.

“Hey!”

“Don’t you wanna live forever, Loki?” Thor asks. His big brother stands there, bathing in sunlight, cheeks flushed with excitement, and Loki’s eyes widen. “Don’t you wanna live forever with _me_?”

Loki doesn’t know how to catch fish and he doesn’t know how to fight like his father or do magic like his mother yet, but he does know one thing. He knows that Thor is his favorite person in the entire world. And if Thor is going to live forever, then Loki wants to as well. Loki wants to do everything Thor wants to do.

He bites his lip as though thinking on it, then smiles.

“Okay,” he says, wiping his little wet hands on his breeches. “I’ll live forever with you, brother.”

Thor beams.

  
Idunn’s Orchard is all the way on the other side of the grounds, so they push and shove one another and avoid Heimdall when he turns his golden eyes on them.

“Hi Heimdall!” Thor says and Loki waves and Thor’s pulls Loki’s hand and they giggle and stumble over their feet and run across the bright green grass to the far palace grounds. They climb over the border fence that sets the Orchard off from the rest.

The trees in Idunn’s Orchard stand bright and tall, forever in bloom. Thor and Loki pass under branches heavy with apples—red ones, green ones, even pink ones. The air smells so sweet with them that Loki lips his licks. He tugs on Thor’s sleeve.

“Brother,” he says. “I am hungry. Shall we pick one?”

“No,” Thor says. “We have to pick a golden one, Loki.”

“But I am hungry,” Loki says, eyeing the fruit enviously. “And they smell so sweet.”

Thor frowns. “Don’t you want to live forever with me?”

Loki does. He nods his head.

“Then come on,” Thor says and tugs on Loki’s hand again. “Let us find her golden bouquet.”

  
Thor pulls him along and they look and they look. They pass dozens of trees, each beautiful, each laden with apples. They’re never golden, though. They’re never the tree they want.

Loki gets tired, but Thor shakes his head. He _insists._

Finally they come to the edge of the trees and it is only then that they see it—a tree so tall, so large that it reaches into the sky like Yggdrasil itself. Its branches spread out, its boughs reaching to Valhalla above.

The sun reaches high and hot in the sky and something catches Loki’s eyes.

“Look,” he says, grasping Thor’s arm.

There, near the top of the massive tree, hidden under leaves of deep, deep green, are large, golden apples.

“Oh Norns,” Thor breathes out. He turns, excitedly, and grasps Loki by the shoulders. “We have to climb. You’re a good climber, right Loki?”

Loki nods. He is a good climber, in fact.

But the tree is very high. He looks at it with a frown.

“What if we fall?” he asks, the only sensible question.

“I won’t let you fall, brother,” Thor says brightly and hugs his little brother. “I will protect you for all my days.”

Loki glows at that.

“Okay,” he says, trusting Thor. “Let’s climb.”

  
The day is hot and the sun high in the sky. Loki starts first, Thor bending down, holding his hands together, and Loki stepping onto them. Thor helps hoist him up and Loki grabs onto the lowest branch and clambers up. Then Thor reaches up and Loki takes his hand and together they help Thor half scrabble up the trunk of the tree until they’re on the same bough together.

They grin, breathing hard, triumphant.

Loki looks up through the branches. The sunlight streams through, leaving dappled patterns on his skin, on Thor’s golden head.

“Let’s go,” Thor says excitedly and then continue climbing.

  
Thor climbs up the branches quickly and Loki follows closely behind. Their limbs are small, but their movements are fast. Loki swings from bough to bough, laughing, and Thor pretends to fend off monsters and Bilgesnipes.

“I will protect you, Prince Loki!” he says, breaks off a small branch and stabs a pretend monster.

Loki giggles.

“You are an ogre,” he says. “You will not trick me!”

“I trick not! I slay ogres all day! I am a great warrior!” Thor cries. He stabs a branch with his branch and the stick slips from his hand. Both of them watch it fall through the branches onto the ground. “Whoops.”

“Look,” Loki says and points up.

The golden apples are there, just beyond their reach. The branches thin right above them, swaying precariously in the breeze. Loki feels a little nervous, but Thor lets out a shout of delight.

He climbs up quickly and Loki, trusting his big brother, with his entire life, follows.

Loki doesn’t weigh much, but he certainly weighs more than apples. His heart hammers higher and higher in his throat as he pulls himself up, branch to thinning branch. His feet curve over the branches and he holds onto the trunk, but it is a dangerous situation. Thor is above him, nearly to the apples now.

Loki takes in a shaky breath and reaches for the next branch.

He doesn’t know when he feels it. One moment he’s climbing from the bottom branch up and then, suddenly, with a lurch of his heart, he hears the loud, resounding crack.

“I got it!” Thor says excitedly. He turns, golden apple in his hand. His face is shining with youthful enthusiasm. “Loki, I got it!”

“Thor—” Loki says, scared suddenly. He reaches up, but he feels his entire body lurch. The branch beneath his feet splits in half and with a cry, he falls.

  
“Loki!” Thor cries and tries to reach him.

He doesn’t. He loses his own balance instead and, dropping the apple, he topples down through the tree after his brother.

  
Thor and Loki smack against the branches on their way down, scrabbling to get purchase, but finding the wood slipping through their fingers. They both shout and scream and finally land in a heap on the ground.

Loki feels like something—maybe everything is broken. He groans into Thor’s shoulder. Thor, next to him, is whimpering.

The tears spill down Loki’s cheeks, hot and wet, burning all of the scratches he’s gained on his face.

  
Frigga finds them like that, thanks to Heimdall.

“They looked like trouble,” Heimdall tells her.

“They are always trouble,” Frigga sighs. She bends down and her two sons lean into her, tears streaking their little faces. “You will be fine. Come. Let me see you.”

Frigga pats them down carefully, runs her hands through their hair, touches their faces, and wipes away their tears.

It’s only when she gets to their wrists that they both start shouting.

“That hurts!” Thor yells.

“Ow,” Loki whimpers.

Frigga takes both of their wrists into her hands. There, across their wrists, in exactly the same place, they have ripped open their wrists on branches along the way down.

“Oh, boys,” Frigga sighs. “What have you done?”

Heimdall takes both of his little princes in his arms and they take them back to their bed chambers.

There, Frigga takes her time cleaning their wounds, soothing their fear and hurt with cool, soft seidr. When Frigga gets to Loki, her youngest looks up at her with wide, green eyes.

“Can I see?” she smiles.

His eyes fill with tears, but he offers her his hand. She turns it over carefully, looks at the slash on his wrist.

“It will heal,” she says. “But you will have a scar forevermore.”

“What about Thor?” Loki asks, looking over at his brother. Thor is already sitting up in bed, fidgeting with his bandages.

“Thor too,” Frigga says. She tries to hide a smile and fails. “You will both have matching scars, for as long as you live.”

That doesn’t sound so bad to Loki. After all, he thinks, everything he has, he wants Thor to have forever too.

  
After Frigga leaves, Thor climbs into Loki’s bed.

“Show me!” he demands.

Loki sticks out his arm and Thor sticks out his. Across both of their wrists, just as their mother said, there is a slash of a scar, thick in the middle and narrowing at the ends. They’re parallel scars. They match perfectly.

“Amazing,” Thor says happily. Then, without warning, he reaches down and kisses Loki’s scar.

“Hey!” Loki says. “What are you doing?”

“Blessing you,” Thor grins. “Come on. Bless me too.”

Loki looks at Thor dubiously, but he does what his older brother asks, as in all things.

He lifts Thor’s wrist to his mouth and kisses Thor’s matching, parallel scar.

“I bless you, brother,” Loki says.

Thor smiles broadly.

  


**two.**

Loki runs a thumb across his wrist as he lays in bed. He looks up above him, weighed down by the fog of memory. The palace ceiling holds no answers to his predicament, but all of the weight of his apprehension. He has counted the same ice crystals dozens of times and discovered nothing, about himself, or Thor.  
  
  
He had looked at Frigga in fear, after, and Frigga had looked at him with a sad kind of understanding. The witch had reached for him and he had stumbled back, skinning the back of his leg on a jutted rock. He had fled before she had had a chance to say anything more; witch, here, his mother, in another life.

Loki doesn’t know who he is here, but it’s clear to him now that he was someone else, somewhere else, maybe some time else. He feels the seidr thrum under his skin—her magic given, his magic learned. He wonders why, if Thor had been everything to him in another life, he cannot remember him here. He runs his thumb over his scar, again and again, and wonders if this Thor has it too. He has a body of scars and ink and more questions than answers.  
  
Loki feels the chasm of his mind, like the breath of a curse.

  
He sits up, the furs falling to his bare lap. Outside, the horns echo again.

They’re not war horns this time, or at least Loki doesn’t see the Jotun army lined up in the yard, awaiting command. After looking out through the gaping archway of his window, making certain he will not run into some war council he is not fit to answer to at the moment, he wraps his fur about his shoulders and slips out of his chambers.  
  
  
Loki watches servants scurry out of his way as he steps through the palace halls. They do not greet him with fear or even deference, really; it is more of a reserved kind of revulsion, or a nervous kind of caution.

He stops to look at his reflection in the frozen water of the fountain kept in the courtyard between his own wing and the main hall.  He looks at his skin and sees blue. But when he catches his own gaze, he sees eyes of bright green, not red. Jotun blue might creep across his body, but he will always remain an Asgardian; a sheep among wolves, or, perhaps, a wolf among giants.

It feels right and it feels wrong at the same time. Everything feels wrong here, the discomfort settling in the back of his throat and prickling all across his skin. He shakes his head and turns.

At the mouth of the archway leading to the courtyard stands a large figure. At first the person is hidden in shadows, but then he steps into the pale moonlight. Loki’s heart thumps painfully in his throat, his heart rate spiking immediately.

Thor steps forward, furs stretched taut across his impossibly large shoulders.

He opens his mouth, as though to say something.

Loki, visions of a small child of gold in his head, will not let him. He turns and, again, flees.

  
He finds himself in the library, which is where he meant to go anyway. If he wants answers that the witch cannot give, then Loki will have to find them himself.

The Jotun library is surprisingly massive for a culture that prizes war and conquest above all. The shelves reach up beyond the ceiling, tomes of books well-preserved by the cold and ice. Loki runs his fingers across the spines of books he has no intention of reading. When he removes them, there’s a sheen of frost cooling on his fingertips.

He licks his lips and moves down the rows, up the rows, searching for something he is not sure of and seeking something that will help.

  
He finds an old book about Asgard and an even older book about the art of seidr. Seidr is considered lowcraft on Jotunheim. It is either meant to trick, as the witch’s seidr, or heal, as Eir’s seidr, but both are cowardly to want and even worse to wield. The Jotnar prize only blood and the fight and little else. As Loki skims through the pages of the Asgardian history, he finds that it is not so different from Jotunheim’s enemies—their former rivals. Loki’s...home?

Loki lingers on a picture of a rainbow bridge. On top of it is etched an old ruler with one eye, a young woman with straight black hair, and a familiar face, wreathed in gold, glowing green. His heart beats faster and he traces the ink around Frigga.

“What does it all mean?” he asks aloud.

There is no one to answer.

  
He spends hours in between the stacks of untouched books, the only sounds the turning of pages and the rhythmic tapping of his nails against the table. He reads about war, about conquest, about custom. He reads about the tree of life, about the Norns, about magic and the source of it. He closes his eyes and tries to feel his own fill every inch of him, urges the pulse of it to cover his body and unlock the secrets he cannot touch.

He begs his seidr to help him.

It does not.

He falls asleep, head on a book.

  
Loki awakens to the feeling of someone watching him. He startles up, the page of the book fluttering as it unsticks from his face. He can feel the person’s stare, boring into him. His heart picks up and he looks around carefully, before seeing him.

He is perched on a ledge near the window, watching Loki, and eating an apple.

His golden hair is half braided back, his red eyes dark, following Loki closely. Juice dribbles down his chin and Loki watches the trail before snapping his gaze back up.

“You are following me,” he says, gathering the courage to speak.

A blue thumb wipes up the rivulet of juice. He sticks the thumb into his mouth and sucks. Loki feels queer.

“You left me no choice,” Thor says. He takes another bite of his apple. He doesn’t stop looking.  

Loki swallows his fear and closes his books.

“What is it that you want?” Loki asks. He does not know how to treat Thor in this world. They do not seem close, but Fandral and Sif did not make it seem as though they were enemies either. Perhaps they found one another distasteful. Yet, Thor keeps seeking him out.

Thor cocks his head. The low light of the library glints off of the crown of his head.

“There is something different about you,” Thor says, as though lightly.

Loki feels the nerves like a live wire in his stomach.

“Oh?” he asks. He gathers the books and stands.

“What do you seek?” Thor changes tactics. “All alone, in secret?”

“Books,” Loki says. He makes sure to position them in his arms so Thor cannot see the titles. “Am I not allowed to read?”

“Surely,” Thor grins.

Loki doesn’t like the look of that grin; like a wolf hidden behind long, razor teeth.

He turns, hands sweaty.

“Then there is no need for inquisition,” Loki says. He takes a step forward and then another step. He takes one more, meaning to disappear around the stacks and then disappear altogether, but Thor catches him before he has the chance.

The books go tumbling out of Loki’s arms and he inhales sharply as Thor presses him to the bookshelf, hands curled tightly around his wrists.

“Let go!” Loki hisses.

Edges of the bookshelf dig into him, making pain spritz across his bare skin. Loki struggles against Thor, but the larger Jotun is much too strong. The harder Loki struggles, the more cruelly he gets pushed against the shelf. He breathes harshly and books topple, one after the other, here and there and all around then.

His heart thumps against his ribcage, fast and painful.

His arms finally go slack as the fight drains out of him. He breathes in heavily, leaning his forehead against the shelf. After a few silent moments, Thor lets his wrists go.

He allows Loki to turn and that’s when Loki tries to bolt.

Thor grabs his wrists and slams him back against the shelf again. Loki grunts as pain sparks up and down his spine.

“Why do you run from me, brother?” Thor’s mouth curves up into a sneer. “Why do you hide?”

“You are not my brother,” Loki tries to bite.

“It has been two hundred years,” Thor says, tightening his grip further. “When will you consider me your blood?”

Is this a test? Loki thinks blindly. Will he be killed for this? Will Thor tell Laufey that their ward has been stolen and replaced by an imposter?

Will he accidentally brush that scar on his wrist and trigger something that should be left buried?

Loki doesn’t answer Thor. He tries to keep the fear off his face, knowing fear is the worst kind of weakness among frost giants. He isn’t successful. He can feel it break over his features, the unparalleled, unhidden fear of someone with everything to lose.

He thinks Thor will eat him alive.

He’s surprised when, after a heartbeat, Thor lets him go.

“You fear me,” Thor says. Loki winces and he takes a step back. Thor does not eat him alive. He does not even sneer. He looks, instead, cautious. “Why?”

“Should I not?” Loki asks, swallowing heavily.

“You never have before,” Thor replies.

That is not a good enough reason to never fear someone, Loki thinks, but he does not voice it out loud.

“I am tired,” Loki lies. “My travels left me weary.”

“Aye,” Thor looks at him curiously. “Where did you go again?”

“It is no matter of yours,” Loki says. He adjusts his furs with some measure of annoyance. “Why did you attack me?”

“You would not speak to me,” Thor says. His red eyes flash darkly.

“And?” Loki asks, annoyance increasing.

“I wished to speak to you.”

“And do you always get what you wish?” Loki asks.

Thor tilts his head, looks at him, and grins.

Loki shifts, tucks that smile away with unease. It is too similar to one he has seen before—the confidence of a young boy under an orchard.

“Not this time,” Loki says. He will not let Thor get under his skin; not when he does not know what he has to lose, but knows he has to lose it.

“I simply want to talk,” Thor says slowly.

“I do not,” Loki replies. He takes a step back from the other Jotun.

“Brother—” Thor says and Loki makes to shoulder past him. “Loki, stop!”

He grasps at Loki’s shoulder and Loki recoils as though he has been burned.

“Let go!” he says shrilly. He stumbles back, trying to push Thor away. The back of his feet hit the edge of a pile of toppled books and he curses as he stumbles over them, losing his balance, hands clutching at the air.

“Loki!” Thor shouts, his hand darting forward to grasp him. He grabs at Loki’s shoulder and misses the timing. Loki slips backwards, out of his grip, and Thor’s other hand closes around his throat instead. Loki chokes a little against Thor’s grip, his nails scrabbling against Thor’s bare chest.

Thor’s thumb presses against Loki’s collarbone and then suddenly, Loki gasps in water, his vision going black.

*

They are both older this time, Thor a young man, tall and broad, with muscles rippling across his back and up his stomach, under tunics that cling to him when he gets caught in a rain shower during wet season or when it is particularly hot and clothing sticks to him as though it cannot bear to be parted from his skin. His hair glows golden and his skin glows golden and his eyes are the bright, clear blue of the purest river in the Norn forest. Youth suits Thor in a way it does not suit Loki.

Loki, in contrast, is pale, all angles and long lines. If Thor is golden, bright as the sun or Idunn’s apples, Loki is cream and the darkest part of the night sky. He is certainly tall, although not as tall as his older brother, with jet black hair and green eyes that could be beautiful, but which many find unnerving. Loki is a young prince of Asgard, but he has heard the whispers come through the halls; unnerving is by far the least offensive of the words he is called.

They are older than they were in Idunn’s Orchard, but they are young still.

They no longer float in the water on their backs or lay together in the grass, fingers intertwined, the sun beating down on their faces and chests. They do not run through the palace grounds terrorizing the servants and their parents in turn and definitely together; and they never go back to Idunn’s Orchard.

They grow, Thor and Loki, into two different people, but it is not sad or bittersweet.

They are friends first and brothers second.

“No, you oaf,” Loki says, lounging against his favorite tree, book in his lap. “We are brothers first and friends second.”

Thor, who has been laying on his back, throwing a ball into the air and catching it, over and over again, catches it, and turns to face his brother.

Thor gives him that easy, open grin; the one he reserves for Loki only. Not even the girls and women who have begun to linger around him receive this. It is a secret for Loki and Loki alone.

Loki ducks his head, warms under the attention. He is distracted but a moment, but a moment is all it takes for Thor to twist up and clamber into Loki’s lap.

“Hey!” Loki protests.

“Will you prove it to me, then?” Thor says, drawing Loki closer. “Brother?”

Loki is not sure how he ended up here, one of Thor’s hands on his arm, the other pressed against his neck.

At times like this, Loki thinks Thor must know. He must feel the rapid beating of his heart; the desire that burns at his skin.

“How?” Loki asks, softly.

“I would have everyone know,” Thor says, voice careful. “That you are my brother.”

Loki swallows. The knot at his throat moves, presses against Thor’s thumb.

“How?” Loki asks again.

Thor smiles.  
  
  
There is a man Thor knows in the village.

Thor dons a hooded cloak and Loki picks not his favorite green one, but a grey one that hides his black hair and his inquisitive eyes. He presses a hand to Thor’s face and it ripples, smooths away his brother’s exceptionally handsome features. In its place is a common, forgettable face with muddy brown eyes and a large nose.

“Hey!” Thor says and Loki laughs. Then Thor wrinkles his nose and smiles at Loki. “I like it.”

Loki gives Thor a half smile and Thor intertwines their fingers together. There forms a half-memory of all the years of their childhood. Thor pulls Loki along and they disappear off the palace grounds together.

  
The village is not too far from the palace grounds and Thor and Loki are no strangers to it. As soon as they had turned of age to leave with no supervision, they had stumbled onto it, young and beautiful and wealthy, two princes discovering the world for the first time. They had worn cloaks and Loki had disguised their hair and they had had their fill of food and ale and bawdy ballads with villagers who had insisted Thor sing, even though Loki had warned them their ears would not thank them for it.

It had been fun and raucous and hot. Thor had been eyed to the nine realms and back by every woman and not a few men. Loki had gained none of that attention, but he had not minded so. He had drank his ale and asked villagers curious questions about the countryside and when Thor had needed a dancing partner, he had grabbed his brother by the arm and the two of them had spun around, dancing and singing and laughing until their lungs ached.

Loki eyes the tavern as they pass it and tucks away a secret smile, a memory meant just for him.

“Here,” Thor says excitedly.

He pulls Loki through the door to a dark looking shop and Loki lets him.

  
“Are you serious?” Loki asks, looking around them. There are pieces of parchment with beautiful, dark drawings covering the wall. There is a tall, bald man with pictures crawling up and down his bare arms. It is an inking shop.

“Are you afraid?” Thor asks with a grin.

Loki turns toward him, bristling.

“Of a little ink? I am a prince of Asgard.”

Thor leans against the counter.

“It is fine to be afraid,” Thor says. He crosses his arms. “There is nothing to be _ashamed_ of.”

Thor’s tone says the opposite and Loki will not have his brother thinking him a coward.

“Why brother,” Loki says sweetly. “I was only wondering what we would get?”

Thor’s features, still bland and mocking, melt away to his normal ones. Fierce blue eyes sparkle as they watch Loki.

Thor moves and when Thor moves, it swallows all of the space and air between them. His fingers curl into Loki’s tunic and he finds himself pulled forward, his own hands fluttering to Thor’s shoulders. He feels the hard knot of muscle under his palms and swallows.

“Will you give me your rune?” Thor asks quietly.

This is—this is the most intimate act Thor could have asked of him. Loki’s palms sweat, his heart in his throat. He feels dizzy with meaning his brother does not want nor mean.

“You want...my rune upon you?” Loki asks. “Forever?”

Thor cocks his head and Loki’s stomach flutters.

“Who better to carry with me for all of eternity?” Thor asks. “But my brother?”

The tip of his fingers brush the skin under Loki’s tunic and it tingles there, starts at his collarbone and sweeps up.

“Then I must have yours,” Loki whispers.

“Yes,” Thor says, bright, large, beautiful. “You must have mine.”

  
Loki watches as the man gestures Thor over to a chair.

“Where d’you want it?” the man asks.

They pay him for his discretion. They pay him well. It is just as likely, however, that he does not care at all. Skin is skin.

Thor looks up at Loki, expectantly.

Loki takes a breath and steps forward.

“Take off your shirt,” he says to Thor and Thor does so.

The resulting image is one that will warm Loki’s bed for many nights after; his golden, strong, magnificent brother, his skin bare to Loki—his for the marking.

“Here,” Loki says, his heart thudding.

His presses his palm at the space above Thor’s heart.

The bald man raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.

For a moment Loki thinks he’s transgressed. He fears Thor will understand and then take everything from him Loki has ever desired.

“Perfect,” Thor says, instead.

  
Loki watches as the man settles close to Thor, needle and ink in his hand.

It’s a close, intimate feeling, watching his man take his brother’s smooth, virgin skin, press a needle to it and let black bleed into gold. Thor only winces initially and then quiets. He is quieter than Loki has ever known him to be.  
  
Loki feels dizzy as he sees it, the shape of his rune inked into Thor’s chest. He watches it form, one point, a smooth line down to the corner, and a smooth line back out. It takes moments, barely longer, and then it is looking at him, kenaz, dark and black in a small sea of pink.

 

 

 

Kenaz, the rune of light; of fire. Vision; illumination; knowledge. Loki. He lets out a breath and Thor looks at him.

“How does it look?” Thor asks.  
  
Loki can’t form the words to answer him. He swallows and turns away.  
  
  
When it is Loki’s turn, he is nervous. Thor sits down next to him and Loki unbuttons the top of his tunic, raises it up and off his head. The cool air slides around his skin and if he did not know better, he would say Thor was looking.

Where Thor is sunkissed, Loki looks as though he has never felt sunlight on his skin. It has always been this way for him. No matter how he tries, he looks pale, white, his skin smooth and light as alabaster.

“Where?” he asks Thor, feeling self conscious. He does not love this part; to compare what he is and what he has with his brother.

Thor does not comment on it. Instead, he looks upon Loki with—a strange expression on his face. Loki cannot read it. His eyes are darker than they were a moment ago, although Loki does not know why.

Thor leans forward and Loki holds his breath.

“Here,” Thor says. He brushes his thumb against Loki’s collarbone and where he touches, Loki feels his skin burn like fire. “I want to be here.”

  
The bald man leans over Loki and he closes his eyes. It’s a sharp pain at first, but he does not hiss. Instead, he takes it in, swallows it, revels in the feeling of ink and blood, of the sweet discomfort of his first marking. He bites his lower lip and lets out a shaky breath, but that is all he reveals. In his mind, he sees Thor’s rune, as though he traces it every day. Thurisaz. Defender; action; fertility; thunder. Thor.

 

 

 

When the man finishes, he leans back and Loki opens his eyes. His vision swims for a moment, but then he blinks away the wet warmth.  
  
“How does it look?” he asks Thor, with half a smile.

Thor is never one to lose his words, but he almost seems at a loss for them now. He swallows and when he speaks, his voice is a pitch higher than it usually is.  
  
“Perfect,” he says. “It looks perfect, brother.”

*

“Loki,” Thor says above him, urgently.

He is in Thor’s arms, his body frozen, his mind caught in between memory and reality.

Loki opens his eyes and sees Thor melt, almost immediately, in relief.

“What was that?” Thor asks. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Loki manages to form the word. He touches his forehead. “Nothing.”

It did not feel as though nothing and it did not look it or seem it, either.

But he doesn’t know this Thor and he doesn’t trust him.

He doesn’t think it would help him at all to tell him he cannot remember anything of this life; that, in a past one, they were brothers; and that Loki, there, was in love with him.

 

 

 

 

**three.**

The only thing that makes Loki feel normal is magic. He attends feasts and avoids Laufey and fulfills what duties are required of him, minimally. He sees Fandral, on occasion, and suffers through Sif, on other occasions. Thor seeks him out, constantly, and Loki only barely keeps from fleeing every time he does.

“Something is the matter with you,” Thor says to him quietly, after he positions himself next to Loki at a feast.

They are celebrating Jotunheim’s victory on—Nidavellir? Vanaheim? Loki does not know and he does not care. This place feels more foreign and less welcoming with each uncovered memory. If this is not his reality, then what is? And how will he get back to it again?

“It is in your imagination,” Loki says and drinks his wine. He looks at Laufey and Hellbindi, sitting at the high table and imbibing for a victory they played no role in.

“No,” Thor says. He turns his head and his mouth brushes the shell of Loki’s ear. “I know you.”

“You do not know me,” Loki nearly hisses. “We have never been close.”

Thor is quiet for a moment. Then he leans in closer. Loki can feel the heat roll off his body. It warms his cheek.

“I do not have to be close to watch you,” Thor says into his ear. “Little brother.”

Loki cannot ignore the shiver that moves down his spine.

He moves back and tries to keep the room from spinning around him.

He finishes his meal and excuses himself almost immediately.  
  
  
Loki finds his books and arranges them at an altar made of ice. There are three of them, leatherbound, with runes and different shapes on the cover of each, pages open to the spells he is casting.

On the ground, in a shallow crystal bowl, he has the ingredients he needs to make his offering. It is a retrieval spell. If he completes it properly, it will retrieve anything he desires.

In this case, he desires his memories—all of them.  
  
  
He is halfway through his precise spell, the crystal bowl now on the altar. Loki has combined the ingredients, offered his seidr. His eyes glow a bright green, the bristles at the back of his neck lifting. His hair swirls around him.

He invokes words in a holy tongue he cannot recognize, but knows is right. He feels it run through him, freezing cold and burning hot, his blood humming with power.

Loki feels more alive than he has since he awoke in this world.

He is illuminated, every part of him, a vessel for this incantation.

That’s when Thor comes in.  
  
  
Loki turns, the seidr creeping in green and silver ropes across his arms.

“Loki,” Thor says, alarmed and stunned.

Loki has an ancient word in his mouth and a vial of potion in his hand. His fingers jerks in surprise and it spills all over him, coating his arm in a thick black liquid.

An acrid smell and smoke billow off his skin. The vial shatters to the ground and Thor is upon him before Loki has a chance to scream, hand at Loki’s shoulder, trying to scrub the potion away with his bare hand. His fingers press along the vein in Loki’s inner arm and when Loki turns his head, Thor is gone.

*

Loki learned magic at a young age. It was a gift given to him by Frigga, a secret that only she and him shared. Asgard was not afraid of seidr and it was not entirely dismissive of it, but it eyed it warily, with the unease Loki was already used to receiving. When others learned that he was learning witchcraft as well, it only made him seem queerer to them; more untouchable and outlandish. Unkind words were exchanged in whispers at every corner he turned, although they never reached his ears directly. That was the thing about unkindness—just because it wasn’t direct, did not mean it did not find its target. Loki loved his seidr, but others did not love him. He heard the whispers all the same.

Frigga taught him the kind of magic that sank into his bones, gave him a purpose other than competing with Thor. She taught him incantations and spells, potions and the art of healing. His appetite for reading was insatiable, so she gave him books to devour when she did not have time to teach him herself. Loki learned how to turn one thing to another and another thing back to the first. He could dispense enough seidr to heal a shallow wound and brew a potion fit to kill a king. He could cast a spell to understand every creature and he could cast a spell to turn into a creature himself. Once, he turned into a bird and flew away, grew lost in the mountains, and returns two moons later.

Sometimes the spells were enough and sometimes they weren’t. Each time delighted him. He loved the power he had in his fingertips, within his blood. Thor had a different kind of magic he wielded with careless abandon—the power to charm, the power to walk among people and have them care for him. Loki had never known such magic, but he was just as pleased with his own. Let Thor have people. Loki was content with the power in his blood.  
  
  
It is sometime when Asgard is at war with Jotunheim. Asgard is always at war with Jotunheim, but this winter it had been particularly brutal. Jotunheim had penetrated Asgard’s defenses not once, but nearly twice. Asgardian warriors had been lost to the war. Odin himself had come back from one battle, battered. Thor had come back from another with a wound so deep that it had taken Loki more than simple seidr to heal him. He had brewed him a potion, cast his seidr over him, and when that didn’t work, he called for Eir.

The winter is bitter and the battles going poorly. Thor is ready to go to war again, as is Odin. Loki will go this time too, although he does not desire war in the same way his brother does. He desires something else instead—protection, power. He stays in the library deep into the night one evening and finds a spell that gives him all that he desires.

It does not ask for much in return.

Magic, it will give him, and protection—in exchange for his body.

He does not think it is quite that literal. Loki thinks it is worth the risk.  
  
  
He takes notes on the preparation of the spell. It will take three different brewed potions, the right incantation, and a blood offering during a full moon. Loki gathers his materials and begins preparations.  
  
It takes him three moons and he does not see anyone during that time. He calls food to his chambers. He spends all day and all night preparing. He leaves his chambers to go for a walk, occasionally, and to gather more ingredients and then comes back to his spells and his own solitude. No one notices, of course—no one has time for the youngest, strange prince of Asgard.  
  
  
He is prepared, the night of the full moon. He has three vials of potions, a sheet of incantations, a circle drawn of salt and sand around him. He is to call to the Norns to offer himself in exchange for protection and power. He can then give that protection to whoever he touches, or whatever he chooses. He could choose himself. He could choose Asgard.

Loki has not decided yet.

The first step of the spell is to swallow the first vial and say an incantation in ancient Asgardian. Loki does so. The potion tastes like what he imagines the bottom of the lake tastes like. Loki nearly gags, but refrains. He runs his tongue along his upper lip and then puts the vial down. He begins his incantation.

The second step is to pour the second potion on the salt and sand. The potion will seep into the protection circle and it will glow a bright, white light. Loki is to touch it and say an incantation in the language of the Vanir. He does this too, feels a surge of staggering, white hot power shoot through his fingers as he squats, touching the circle.

The third step is to carve magic into your body.

Loki stands over the glowing circle, dagger in his hand. He holds the blade with his right hand and stretches his left arm out. He takes his bottom lip in between his teeth, takes a bracing breath, and begins carving the protective compass into his skin, along his inner arm vein. Vegvisir. The book of spells; a magical stave; a call to power, protection, guidance through the storm.  
  
  
Loki does not cry out, but he shakes terribly. His blood pours onto the ground as he carves the symbol into his body, seeping into the salt and sand, and the circle turns a dark, glowing red.

His hand shakes so badly that the smaller marks appear more as knicks than as carved skin. He has to retrace these marks and he bites his lips so hard he draws blood there too. More than once the dagger falls to the ground. More than once he bends, trembling, picks it back up, and begins again.

He begins to float, as though outside of his body.

“Loki,” he hears, distantly. And then, louder, closer, “ _Are you mad?_ ”

Thor’s voice is in his ear, in fact, but Loki is so far away, so detached from his body and the power running through him that he can’t process it properly.

His eyes glow white as Thor turns him. Around them, the circle blazes with power. It burns them. It _burns them_. Loki can feel it boiling under his skin and it’s then—only then, that he looks down at his carved mark. It’s red, blood red, and bright, so very bright, and then it begins to pulse and Loki—

Loki screams.

*

When he comes back this time, Thor is gripping him between his hands. Loki is shaking like a leaf, a cold sweat on his forehead and the back of his neck. His hands are curled into claws, drawing blood from his palms. His mouth is dry. He shakes. He _shakes_. Thor squeezes so hard that Loki feels the gasp shuddering out of his chest. His grip loosens.

“Loki,” Thor says and then, once Loki’s managed to focus his eyes on him, demands, “You were _screaming_ . You froze and spasmed and started screaming. What _happened_?”

Loki shakes his head. Something wet slides down his face. His throat burns.

“It happened in the library too,” Thor says, voice low and angry. “How often do you have these—fits?”

“Let go,” Loki says, more a moan than a command.

“Tell me,” Thor says. He doesn’t let go. “I have seen you go slack twice now and I would bet Laufey’s crown that it was not the first time. What has happened to you, Loki?”

Loki shakes his head and begins his struggle.

“Let go,” he says. “Let _go_.”

“Tell me,” Thor shakes him, his fingers pressing painfully into Loki’s shoulders. “Brother, you avoid me, you will not talk to me. When I sit next to you, you cringe. _What has happened_?”

“ _Let go!_ ” Loki says shrilly, clawing at Thor, trying to hit him, trying to push him away. Thor does not budge. He is barely moved.

“Where do you go when your eyes turn to glass?” Thor asks.

Loki takes in a sharp breath and freezes.  
  
Thor releases one shoulder and lifts his hand. Loki winces, closes his eyes, expecting the worst. Instead, Thor cups his face, runs a hand into his sweaty hair.

Loki opens his eyes and Thor looks distressed.

“What eats at you?” Thor whispers. And then, “Why have you forgotten me?”  
  
  
Loki does not know how to trust, not in this world, and perhaps not in any. But Thor holds his face and his thumb rubs across Loki’s collarbone again. The rune shines brightly, burned into his skin.

“You have my rune on you,” Thor says. “You did not have that before.”

Loki shakes himself free from Thor, his mind wired, the vestiges of the memory burning on his forearm, on his skin everywhere. He is overcome with the overwhelming feeling of panic seeping through each part of him. He takes in a breath, trembling violently, and when Thor reaches for him again, Loki pushes him back.

Before Thor can think twice, Loki is upon him, hands pressed to his shoulders, fingernails digging in, pinning him to the ground.

Thor looks up at him, red eyes catching panicked green ones, and doesn’t move. Loki’s long, black hair slides across his shoulders and onto Thor’s.

His breathing is heavy and Thor’s is slow, loud. They stare at one another for one unending moment.

“Are you Loki?” Thor asks.

“No,” Loki says through gritted teeth. Then, “Yes.”

He moves Thor’s fur and scrabbles his hand down his chest almost violently, almost frantically. He stalls at the spot over Thor’s heart where his rune should be.

It’s not there.

Loki looks for it frantically, presses his hand against the very spot as though his touch will make it appear.

It does not. There’s nothing there but smooth, blue skin.

Something in Loki crumbles then—this Loki and that Loki. Everything he was and everything he is no longer; none of it feels right anymore.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath and then collapses into Thor.

Thor hesitates for just a moment and then wraps his large arms around Loki.

“Tell me,” he says. He presses a kiss to Loki’s head. “Tell me what I can do.”

  


**four.**

There is a careful knock on the door to Loki’s chambers. Loki is sitting at his dresser, silk robe covering his body. It is more clothing than Jotuns care to wear, but he is in the safety of his own room and he likes the feel of silk besides. He adjusts it about his shoulders and turns his head.

“Come in,” he says.

The door opens slowly, hesitant at first, and then more firmly. Thor is there, as Loki knew he would be.

“I have come to see if you are all right,” Thor says, watching him.

He is always watching him, his—brother?

Loki’s hair is long, reaching down more than half his back. He has it tucked behind an ear. It’s wet. If he does not tend to it soon, it will dry in waves.

“I just bathed,” he says.

“Oh,” Thor says. He looks, maybe, a bit disappointed. “I will leave you alone, then.”

Loki looks at him, the Jotun nearly twice his size, with a face he is beginning to remember and a voice he is starting to feel in his bones.  
  
“I am just about to tend to my hair,” Loki says. “You do not have to leave.”

Loki can see the lines of Thor’s shoulders visibly ease. He steps in and closes the door behind him.

“Can I...watch?” Thor asks quietly.

It is a somewhat strange request, but Loki finds he doesn’t mind.

“You may,” he says, granting Thor permission.

Thor takes a careful seat on Loki’s bed and Loki turns to himself in the mirror.

**

He had told Thor everything. His mind torn asunder, his forearm burning with the scar of magic, he hadn’t felt he had a choice. He had needed someone—anyone. He had needed Thor.

Thor had held him and listened. And then, when Loki had nothing left to say, when he was spent of all of his heartache and left only with the fear that Thor would turn on him, that he would give him to Laufey for a death sentence, Thor had touched the rune at Loki’s collarbone.

“I will help you,” Thor had said. “Together, we will unlock them, one by one.”

**

He is beginning to know what he looks like in his other form; in his other life. His memories are piecing together, not particularly fast, but neither is a lifetime put together with speed. He feels he knows the other Loki more and, with him, the other Thor as well. He is becoming familiar with his thoughts, his feelings, even his body.

His current form, Loki finds, still remains somewhat of a mystery.

He looks at his reflection and it is not displeasing. His features are sharp, handsome in a different way than Thor’s. He isn’t all raw power and strength, but something subtler than that. When he sees his green eyes set into his blue face, the ridges raised on his head, the slope of his two horns—well. It isn’t monstrous. It is almost a pleasing elegance.

He takes his brush, begins at the top of his hair, and begins to stroke down.

Loki’s hair is long and silky, the strands giving away to the brush bristles as he runs it through them. The waves seem to melt under the attention he gives his hair; his hair growing straight and soft. He finishes a section and puts the brush down. He runs a hand through that section and smiles. It is soft as silk.

When Loki looks up, he catches Thor looking at him. Again, it is a strange expression on his face, although not an unpleasant or even hostile one. He looks almost thoughtful. Yearning, Loki would say, if he didn’t know better.

“Can I—” Thor asks and his voice seems to catch in his throat.

Loki pauses, surprised at the feeling of nerves suddenly simmering in his stomach.

“You may,” he says.  
  
  
Thor’s hand is rough and broad on Loki’s own, almost delicate shoulder. It curves around, covering almost the entirety of it and Loki nearly shivers at the touch.

“Silk,” Thor murmurs, commenting on the robe. “Unusual.”

“There is a time and place for fur,” Loki says, meeting Thor’s eyes in the mirror in front of them. “And there is a time and place for silk.”

Thor doesn’t break eye contact with Loki and he feels it again—that thrill in the pit of his stomach.

Thor raises the brush to the crown of Loki’s head and brings it back down slowly, almost achingly gentle. He goes through one section and moves it to the side. Loki closes his eyes, heart beating erratically, and feels Thor start again. He finishes another section, and then another.

“Oh,” Thor says quietly, as he parts Loki’s hair in the middle and carefully shoves half of his hair across his left shoulder. “There is something here.”

Before Loki can ask what, he feels Thor press his fingers to the spot under Loki’s neck.

It burns quickly and surprisingly, searing hot at the touch, and before Loki can gather the breath to say anything, he falls under.

*

Loki watches Thor, golden, glimmering under the light of a thousand lanterns. There is a crown upon his head.

 _My crown_ , Loki thinks, spite hot and thick in his belly.

Outside, his face is impassive; happy even, for his brother.

For years they have been side-by-side; playing, fighting, loving. Loki had thought maybe—just maybe, one day it would become clear that he was just as worthy. That he was not fighting a battle he was always destined to lose. He was meant for it too. He can feel it as surely as the seidr in his veins—that Thor was not the only one born to be king. Loki was meant to be king too; but why would anyone choose a snake for King, when they could have a lion?

He turns away from the scene, his mind flashing back to a truth learned, a secret he can never untaste.

He curls his fingers into the palm of his hands and for a moment, he can see his skin turn blue in the smooth surface of a lantern.

No, Loki thinks. He will not give Odin this too.

This, he will take for himself.  
  
  
He finds him again, the bald man. It has been years since he and Thor came here together. Thor’s rune still sits on his skin, near his throat. He sees it when he undresses, as bright as his seidr preserves it. He covers it the rest of the time. If Thor does not remember their promise, then he will not either.

The man is still there. If he remembers Loki, he does not say it.

Loki undresses, unbuttons his tunic until it slides off his shoulders. He turns and touches the spot under his neck.

“What would you like?” the man asks.

“Yggdrasil,” Loki says.  
  
  
Yggdrasil is the start and beginning of everything. It is the world tree; the ash from which they are born and intertwined. It is a holy power, the source of birth, death, growth, rebirth.

Yggdrasil connects all the worlds and realms. It is power, old as the universe. It does not care who or what he is.

Yggdrasil does not care that he is a frost giant; a Jotun stolen and raised and hated by Asgard.

  
The needle bites into his skin and this time it isn’t a soothing or pleasurable pain. There is nothing calming about it. It hurts; it takes every reserve of his strength with it.

Loki bites at his lips and lets out puffs of pained breath.

It is not a mere moment or even two. It is endless moments. It is his childhood, a lie, and the love of his parents, a lie, and the love of his brother, lost. It is the blood of the monster that runs through him. His skin shimmers blue under the white and the bald man pauses.

But no, he doesn’t care.

No one does.

Loki does not cry out, but his lips are bitten raw, his palms marked deeply with the crescents of his fingernails.  
  
  
When it is done, there are tears staining his face and ink marking his skin. He cannot see it, but he can feel it.

Just as he cannot feel Thor; but he can see him. Crown on his head, forever out of Loki’s reach.

*

“What did you see?” Thor asks, when he comes back into his body. His finger is tracing Yggdrasil, his hand still curved over Loki’s shoulder.

Loki cannot say it without wanting to weep. He feels it still, the aching loneliness, the cavernous space where his heart should be.

He has never felt it before and he does not ever want to feel it again—the feeling of wanting a single person to love him in the world, and finding no one willing.

“Keep brushing,” he croaks out, voice hoarse.

Thor watches him closely in the mirror.

Then he presses his palm to Loki’s tattoo, a kiss to Loki’s head, and says, “Okay.”

**five.**

Thor comes back the next night. And then the next. And the one after that.

War horns echo through the ice palace, Hellbindi and Laufey gnash their teeth, and Thor, the greatest Jotun warrior of them all, seeks out Loki.

  
“I thought I would hate you, when they brought you to us,” Thor says one night, laying on Loki’s bed.

Loki sits at his desk, spell books around him, fingers combing through his own hair. There are knots at the end—a side effect of a spell he cannot quite get right. His skin is covered in a layer of what feels like soot.

“Did you?” Loki asks.

“At first,” Thor says. He props himself up on an elbow and Loki chooses not to notice the way the torch light pools gold at the Jotun’s stomach. “They taught me all Asgardians were animals. They killed without blinking—not in a noble way, but in a vicious way. They did not know the concept of mercy. They wanted to take our throne and ice and make us bow to their barbaric customs.”

It is strange to hear Thor speak of Asgardians as the enemy.

Loki’s finger catches a gnarl and gently teases it out.

“I thought you would be the same. The prince captured at their final fall,” Thor says, thoughtfully. “But.”

“But?” Loki raises an eyebrow.

Thor says nothing for a moment, just watches Loki fight with his hair.

“When they brought you, you were no monster,” Thor says quietly. “You were the smallest creature I had ever seen, and terrified. You had black hair your back. Yours eyes were bright green.”

“They are still green,” Loki says with half a smile.

“I know,” Thor says and Loki cannot ignore the way he looks at them. “You had lost your mother and father, your entire home, and—“

Loki gives up on a knot and stands. He walks the few feet to the bed and sits down next to Thor.

“And?”

Thor either can’t stop himself or he doesn’t care to. He reaches a hand out immediately, presses it to Loki’s bare shoulder. Loki’s silk robe, which is hanging loose around him anyway, slips farther back.

“Your skin was of cream,” Thor whispers. Loki swallows the shiver. “But Laufey reached for you and before our eyes, it caught blue.”

Loki feels the air thin around him, something caught in his chest, a thickness in his throat.

“Which do you prefer?” he asks.

For a moment it seems as though Thor might lean forward. That he might press his mouth to Loki’s shoulder. It is not an unpleasant thought.

“Both,” Thor says, and holds his gaze again; unwavering.

Again, Loki swallows a shiver.

**

“Let us go to the baths,” Thor says after a while, bored. “I will not have a chance once the war party leaves.”

Loki is still trying to reconcile his memories with his current life. Still, he walks about the halls of ice with more familiarity than before. Sometimes, he even pretends to be the lost son of Asgard, come to be royalty in Jotunheim. He practices swords in the courtyard and is good at it. Loki begins to be a person he does not remember himself to be.

And it is because Thor guides him when he stumbles.

He feels a slow ache fill him at the thought of losing Thor, even for a short while.

“How long will you be gone?” Loki asks.

“Why, brother?” Thor grins. “Will you miss me?”

“No,” Loki replies shortly and Thor cackles. When Thor cackles, his entire torso shakes.

“Come,” Thor says. “Let us go bathe.”

**

Just beyond the palace grounds is a hot spring that gives life to heated pools. The likelihood of a hot spring in the frigid, harsh icescape of Jotunheim is so unlikely that some say it is not sourced by the realm itself, but by a higher power. One of the Norns, maybe, or a witch of great power. Only the royals are allowed near the pools and with them whichever consorts they choose to bring.

The pools are empty today, save for the two of them.

Thor shoves off his furs and begins unstrapping the leather bindings around his arms and legs, the leather skirt around his middle. He casts them off with no shame and while Loki is curious, he turns away.

He begins undoing his own fastenings and by the time he turns again, Thor is in the water. Loki lowers himself to the ground and slips in.

  
The water is hot and soothing on his skin, soaking away the grime of a spell gone not exactly properly. Loki, who has put his hair in a braid, begins undoing it, but not before Thor swims over to him.

“May I?” he asks.

Loki swallows and nods, turning against him.

With Thor’s hands in his hair, Loki almost floats away from comfort. The water around them glows white and blue, slides over their skin with warmth like a kiss.

Loki sighs and feels hands on his shoulders.

“You are so tense, brother,” Thor says. He presses his thumbs into Loki’s shoulders and Loki cannot help the sigh that releases from his mouth. Taking that as encouragement, Thor does it again.

Loki’s eyes close as Thor eases the aches from his back. He drifts away, as though on a dream.

  
“Loki,” the urgency in Thor’s voice awakens him.

At first Loki doesn’t understand what is happening. He opens his eyes and does not see Thor in front of him, but his own body. His eyes are open too, wide and glassy.

“Loki,” Thor says again and Loki feels the voice reverberate in his throat. Thor reaches forward, his hand at the top of Loki’s chest and Loki feels it, his own skin, under Thor’s fingertips.

He feels the shock ripple through him as he understands. He had fallen asleep in his own body and awoken with his spirit anchored to Thor’s.

“What?” Loki says, inside Thor, and, to his surprise, the sounds comes out of his own body.

“These scars,” Thor breathes out. His voice sounds tight, as though he is only barely controlling himself. “Where did they come from?”

Loki, inside Thor and out, looks puzzled. Then, through Thor’s eyes, he sees.

Across his blue skin, criss-crossed and glowing in the light of the water, are scars he’s never seen before. They lattice his body, ripped into his sides, crawl up his chest, slash across his abdomen. There’s a knot of scars at his right shoulder, and scars trailing from his belly button down, hidden under the water, on his thighs.

Thor is shaking. Loki is shaking inside Thor.

“I have never noticed them before,” Thor says. The violence is there, under the surface, Thor’s hot, boiling anger.

“I have hidden them from you,” Loki says. He watches his mouth form the words and realizes they are the truth. He did not even know he was doing so.

“Why?” Thor demands, his hand cupped around Loki’s neck. “ _Why?_ ”

“I did not want to remember,” Loki says and, again, the words are the truth.

Here, in Thor’s body, with Thor’s sentience nestled just under his own, Loki can feel Thor’s feelings as clearly as he can his own. There is anger, of course, and grief, and concern, and somewhere, deep below that, something as undeniable as love.

The purple bruising around Loki’s neck seems brighter in the bath.

Thor swallows and Loki feels his desire too, pooling deep in his belly.

“Go on,” Loki says.

He holds still, waiting.

Thor hesitates, and then he reaches for him.

  
Thor’s fingertips, rough against Loki’s warm, wet skin, start at the knot on his shoulder and begin their slow, aggrieved, worshipful trace. He runs his nails against the scars, rubs his thumb into them. His whole hand covers the torn and mended flesh at Loki’s side and Loki takes in a sharp, sharp breath.

Oh.

His vision swims.

_Oh._

*

What Loki had never told Thor was that he didn’t just appear on Midgard one day with the Scepter in one hand and a mind half lost to madness.

Even before his mind began piecing itself back together, the Mind Stone’s releasing its poisonous, whispering hold, he had known he would never tell Thor this. He was taken to Odin in shackles, thrown into the dungeons, and left, forgotten, with no one but a vision of his mother, for years. He had healed there, against his will, and once he had stopped wanting to die, he had lay on his back, stared at the piercing white ceiling, and understood what had been done to him.

  
Thanos was not a benevolent creature. Loki had known that the moment he had fallen through the wormhole. He had awoken in Sanctuary, with Thanos’s fist around his throat. Thanos had offered him the Scepter and Midgard in exchange for the Tesseract, but that came after.

What had come before, was torture.

  
Everywhere on his body, had been burned and cut marks he knew, even then, even mind knocked loose with pain, he would never heal from. They carved him from himself, took pieces of his flesh, and tortured truths out of him. They lit a fire under his skin, burned the sanity from his mind. They had broken him and made him a traitor of his own people.

Blood had run down his sides and his only solace had been that he hadn’t bled blue; he bled red, just like an Asgardian.

  
He forgets himself, he forgets who he was, the very fabric of what kept him together; what made him Loki.

When he wakes up, his body is shredded and his mind is even worse.  
  
Through the haze, he thinks only this--that he will not forget.

He binds the scars to him; uses his own seidr to memorialize his torture, his pain, onto his flesh. He may lose his mind, but this, no one, not even Thanos, will take from him.

He presses his hand to body and his scars shine with a blinding, white light.  
  
  
When Thanos offers him the Scepter and the chance to rule, he takes it.  
  
  
He falls through the wormhole into Midgard, the Mind Stone eating at a part of him that he’s regaining in pieces, sewn together by confusion and the repression of the violence on his body.

He makes his own choices; not all of his actions are attributable to Thanos and the Infinity Stone. But he is not the Loki he was before and he may never be again.

On his body, he bears scars, and in his mind, he bears scars, and he hides them both, under a layer of seidr and centuries of self loathing.

*

He wakes up in his own body, Thor an inch away from him, one hand in Loki’s hair, the other pressed into a cluster of knotted skin on his hip.

“It was someone,” Thor says.

“Yes,” Loki says, opening his eyes.

“It is the reason you are here,” Thor whispers.

Loki traces the shape of Thor’s face. It is wrong in blue. He wishes it was light, eyes a bright blue, hair so golden it catches the sun and keeps it there.

He wishes he had been there, to save him.

Yet, he loves him all the same.

“Yes,” Loki says.

Thor shakes, as though repressing his own grief.

He wraps his arms around Loki’s scarred, battered, forgotten body, and presses his face into Loki’s shoulder. He holds Loki close and Loki feels his scar fade under the illusion of his magic.

He has not been held like this in years.

He had forgotten he needed to be.

  


**six.**

Thor picks Loki up and Loki wraps his legs around his waist. The water sluices off both of their bodies, pools at the stone at their feet as Thor lifts them out of the bath.

Thor’s mouth is on his own, hot and needy, the desperation sending electric shocks down Loki’s spine. He has one arm around Thor’s shoulder, trying to balance, and his other hand in Thor’s wet hair, scrubbing through.

Thor pries Loki’s mouth open and Loki gasps, his head spinning as he feels Thor’s tongue in his mouth, his teeth biting at his lips.

“Wait,” Loki breathes and pushes an inch between them. Thor’s arms are unmoving. He moves forward again and Loki stops him, hand to his chest. He feels Thor’s growl against his palm.

“Wait,” Loki says again. And then he wraps them in his seidr and they’re crows flying through the air, in through the arches of his window.

**

Thor’s hands are on him the moment they materialize into Jotun again, his large hand circling Loki’s waist and dragging him forward. Loki feels Thor’s need hot and hard against his thigh and his own desperation rises in him, a tidal wave threatening to drag him under.

“I will never let anyone— _anyone_ hurt you again,” Thor growls. He rakes his hand through Loki’s hair, gets to the end and pulls.

“Shut up,” Loki hisses. He digs his nails into Thor’s shoulders and hisses again. “I don’t want to think about that. _Shut up_.”

“You are _mine_ ,” Thor says and lifts Loki up again, his mouth to Loki’s neck. “I have waited over a century for this.”

Loki gasps as Thor bites down on his pulse point.

“I am not—him,” he shudders. “I am—a different—”

“I do not _care_ ,” Thor says and bites again. “You are _Loki_ and that is enough for me.”

It wracks through Loki, from the tip of his spine to the curl of his toes. He takes in a shaky, shuddering breath, and digs his nails into Thor’s face this time, drags him close enough to kiss.

Thor catches his lips and then pulls back.

Loki looks at him furiously.

“Let me feel you,” Thor says and his eyes flicker up.

Loki closes his eyes, dizzy with the weight of it all. He climbs down from Thor’s arms and takes his hand.

He pulls him to bed and pushes him down.

Thor looks up at him with a hunger Loki feels in the pit of his own stomach. Carefully, Loki lifts his legs, one on either side of Thor’s lap, and climbs on top.

He looks down at Thor and then takes one of Thor’s hands in between his own and, with a sharp inhale, lifts it to his horns.  
  
  
A Jotun’s horn is a most intimate thing. There are nerves there; pleasures and pain hidden in a part of himself that is on display and rarely—never—touched.

Thor’s fingers brush over the curve of them and Loki feels himself tighten, fill below.

His breathing comes out shallower and then shallower. Thor is gentle, runs the tips of fingers and the very edge of his nails over the ridges, exploring them cautiously, reverently.

Thor worships Loki like this, achingly slow, and Loki—there is nowhere else he needs to be touched to gasp into Thor’s shoulder, for release.  
  
  
Thor’s hands cover Loki’s shoulders. Loki’s eyes flutter open, the back of his neck covered in sweat. Thor leans close, kisses him softly.

Then he flips them, presses Loki into the bed, his hands pinned above his head.

  
With Loki on display under Thor, he feels not vulnerable, but powerful, in a strange, undefinable way. He is bigger than his body allows. He is both that Loki and this one. He is every Loki.

Thor takes one hand away from Loki’s wrist and drags it down Loki’s chest hungrily.

He stops when he gets to scarring on Loki’s side. His dark red eyes flicker up.

“Loki,” he says. “These scars are of lightning.”

Then he presses his palm to it.

*

They watch their home burn down together.

Loki knows there was no other way and Thor knows there was no other way, but it was still their _home_ . It wasn’t perfect, but it was theirs. It was everything they had ever had and things that they still hoped to be. Hela had taken that from them. Their father had taken that from them. But that was something they would need to go through some other time.  
  
Loki catches sight of Thor in the mirror and Thor chuckles a little at the expression on his face.

“You did always say I took too much after father,” Thor says as he places the eyepatch over his destroyed eye. “I believe you have cursed me.”

“If I were to curse you, brother, do you think it would be just for an eye?” Loki asks. He stands in the doorway, his arms crossed.

They are both out of their armor. Loki has found a light tunic to wear to bed and Thor has on soft pants and a softer shirt. Quarters are limited, so they are, of course, sharing a room together.

It is funny, in a way.

It has taken them centuries to come back to what they used to do freely.

“Well you cannot curse my good looks,” Thor says. “Not even you have the power to do that, witch.”

Loki laughs a little at that and eases himself off the doorframe. The door slides shut with a hiss behind him.

“Oh I do not know,” Loki says as he approaches Thor.

Thor watches him for a moment and then turns around.

Loki grins and reaches up to touch his brother’s shorn hair.

“Does this make you look handsome, do you think?”

“What?” Thor looks outraged. “Of course it does! Why—look at me. I am so rugged and war torn.”

Loki snickers some more and runs his fingers through Thor’s short locks.

“Ugh, you have gone and lost all of your beauty,” Loki says. “What is the purpose of you now?”

“You thought I was beautiful, sweet little brother?” Thor grins back.

Loki snorts and lets go.

“As beautiful as Volstagg in a dress,” he says.

That makes Thor laugh—really _laugh_.

“Do you remember that?” Thor says, grinning widely. “He looked a horror.”

“I appreciate gender nonconformity as much as the next Asgardian, but Volstagg was not meant to woo in skirts,” Loki says dryly.

“You on the other hand…” Thor says. He is baiting Loki, but Loki has actually enjoyed skirts on more than one occasion.

“You should be so lucky as to see,” Loki says with a sweet smile.

He moves to the bed and sits down on it, heavily.

“Yes,” Thor murmurs. He finishes adjusting his eyepatch and comes to sit next to Loki.

They say nothing for a while. Loki can feel the heat of Thor’s body, rolling off of his shoulders. They are but a few fingers away from his own.

“You still burn like lit coals,” Loki says, finally.

“Aye,” Thor says.

“I used to like that,” Loki remarks. “I was alway so cold.”

Thor says nothing for a moment, and then— “I suppose it makes sense to us, now.”

“Yes, now,” Loki says wryly. When Thor does not say anything else, he sighs. “You can say it, you know. I do not care anymore.”

Thor frowns and looks at the ceiling above.

“I do not care that you are a frost giant, Loki,” he says.

“Yes, obviously,” Loki says impatiently. “That is not the point.”

Thor turns to look at him, his one eye raised.

“You should care, Thor,” Loki says. “I am not Asgardian, I am a Jotun.”

“You are Asgardian,” Thor growls.

Loki thinks that once, he would have given everything precious to him to hear Thor say this—to accept him as one of his people. Loki has always felt out of place and now he knows why. He was never meant for Asgard. It is his home, but he is not and will never be _one_ of them.

“I am Jotun,” Loki says. “I am a frost giant from Asgard. It is who I am and I do not wish to be ashamed of it any longer.”

Loki hears Thor take in a sharp breath.

“You should never have been ashamed of it,” he says. “That was not right of father.”

“Very few things were right of father,” Loki says dryly. “But it is no matter.”

“It _is_ matter, Loki—I—” Thor starts and stops. He puts a hand to Loki’s face and turns him to look at him. “I want you to listen to me.”

Loki inclines his head.

“We have made mistakes—father, you, I, even mother, I am sure, though it pains me to say,” Thor says and Loki grins. “I should never have neglected you. I should have seen your pain. And you should not have tried to stab me so many times.”

Loki laughs.

“But, regardless. I am your big brother. And it was my duty to care for you. And I did not.” Thor’s palm is warm against his cheek. “Forgive me, Loki. We have only one another left. And I cannot do this without you.”

Loki’s laughter fades.

He thinks—how many times has he wished to hear these words from Thor? How many centuries had he waited to hear some acknowledgment; a single phrase that told Loki that Thor loved him as much as Loki loved Thor.

Perhaps not in the same way, but in _some_ way.

“We are brothers,” Loki says. “What is there to forgive?”

“If you knew,” Thor says. “You would never forgive me.”

That makes Loki pause.

“If I knew what?” he asks.

The air between them grows thick, heavy with unsaid words. Thor tries to take away his hand, but Loki covers it with his own.

Thor has one eye left, but it holds his guilt clearly. Loki thinks maybe he has spent his entire life reading and misunderstanding his brother.

There is something here he should have seen centuries ago.

“Look at me,” Loki commands.

Thor is reluctant to, but he is not a coward. In the end, he looks at Loki and what Loki sees there is enough to tell him what he has figured out for himself.

That he and Thor were never rivals. They were, and always should have been, on the same side.

Loki keeps Thor’s hand caught on his cheek, braces another hand at Thor’s shoulder and carefully—so carefully—moves into his lap.

Thor seems to be holding his breath, but his free hand moves to Loki’s hip immediately.

“Loki, you—” Thor swallows. “You do not have to do this. I am not asking anything of you.”

“What, you think because you are my king now, I will simply start to listen?” Loki asks. He hovers over Thor, a head above him. Thor cranes his face up and Loki looks down onto it.

“I am your king?” Thor asks.

“Yes,” Loki says. “Of that, I have no doubt.”

“Oh,” Thor breathes.

They do nothing but look at one another for the space of time between them. Their chests rise and fall, one following the other. The air around them is electric. Loki feels electric sparks at the base of his spine.

Thor moves his hand and it slips under Loki’s tunic.

Loki’s breath catches in his throat and he frames Thor’s face in between his hands.

“I give this to you freely,” Loki says to Thor. “Do not break my heart again.”

“I am sorry,” Thor says to Loki. “For having done so before. Forgive me. Forgive me.”

“Stop asking for my forgiveness,” Loki says and kisses him.

  
When Thor and Loki fuck, it is neither slow, nor fast. It is neither aggressive, nor gentle. They fuck with a century of knowledge, of watching one another and yearning for a thing they never thought they could have.

Thor runs his hands up and down Loki’s body and Loki sucks a bruise onto his king’s neck. They tear clothes from each other’s backs, dump them onto the floor and come back together, hot, wet, feverish kisses, a hunger neither of them can satiate. They have waited centuries for this, for the chance to learn one another’s bodies, to kiss the marks on one another’s skins. Loki puts his mouth to his rune, above Thor’s heart, and bites and Thor makes a sound that Loki will not soon forget.

Thor gets his hand on Loki’s length and Loki pants into his shoulder. He bites him there too, leaves a mark that punches a groan out of Thor’s gut.

They turn, Loki on top, and then they turn, Thor on top.

Thor takes his time taking Loki apart, watching Loki arch under his touch, listening to his soft gasps as he finds his pleasure point. Loki does not give Thor the same courtesy. He fucks Thor fast, hard, desperately. Loki can tell when Thor is close, because sparks begin gathering at his temples. Thor’s eye, open wide, a crystal, electric blue, begins glowing. Loki is buried in Thor, Thor’s nails digging into Loki’s side.

“Let go,” Loki says, panting. “ _Let go, brother_.”

With a shout from deep, deep in his chest, Thor lets go.

Lightning crawls up Thor, burns across Loki’s side, winds through his hair, lighting up his eyes, wreathing him in thunder, and explodes all around them.

*

Loki opens his eyes and Thor is lying next to him, stroking his face. He turns to look at him and Thor smiles.

He leans forward and presses a kiss to his mouth.

“You were not screaming this time,” Thor says.

Loki feels his whole body bathed in a lightness of feeling. He can still feel it; the lightning burning into his skin. It is the most loving touch he has ever felt.

“I think, we have always loved each other,” Loki says. “In every timeline the Norns have set for us.”

Thor looks at him with something close to achingly tender fondness.

“Have you been dreaming about me, Loki?” he asks.

Loki smiles and presses forward into him, hand on Thor’s chest, mouth on Thor’s mouth.

“I have been remembering you, Thor.”

Thor opens his mouth and Loki slips in. Thor shifts them both, rolls Loki onto his back, presses him against the sheets, parts his legs, and when he presses a finger in, Loki gasps.

**  
seven.**

Six, Loki thinks. He unlocks six memories and understands himself better for it, but it does not cure what makes him ache. He is here, in a world not his own, surrounded by people who could be his, if he belonged.

It is funny, in a way. In his other life, he had been a frost giant caught in a world of Asgardians and here, he is an Asgardian caught in a world of Jotun.

“Is it so bad?” Thor asks. He presses a kiss to Loki’s temple, circles Loki’s waist with his arms from around back.

They stand on the highest ice tower, eyes toward the broken rainbow bridge. The wind in Jotunheim is cold and unforgiving and although Loki runs cold, his skin burns nonetheless. He leans back into Thor’s warmth and Thor kisses him again, on the ear.

“I don’t belong here,” Loki says, although the truth is he hadn’t belonged there either. Loki has never belonged anywhere. He has only belonged to a certain person, through both of his lives.

“But you were here before,” Thor argues. “You do not remember, but I do.”

“Then is it not unfair to keep your Loki from you?” Loki asks. “I am not him.”

“Every Loki is mine,” Thor says. “You said so yourself.”

Loki sighs. He does not how to explain it; how living with memories that belong to a different body and residing in the reality he does is not freeing. It is shackling. Some days he fears he is going mad.

“Let me ask you something different, then,” Thor says. “What is it that you are looking for? You wish to unlock these memories within you. Say we find every one. What then?”

What then, indeed?

Thor thinks he’s asking a question Loki hasn’t spent entire nights wondering.  The thing, is that he fears he knows the answer.

Six unlocked so far.

The only number more powerful than three, is seven.

**

He spends his days working on his spellcraft, reading through the Jotun library, and even providing counsel when asked of him. Loki does not have to remember his life here to know how politics works. That is something he needs only his wit and intellect and a basic understanding of Asgardian war theory for. Luckily, he reads more than any Jotun alive.

At night, Thor seeks him out or Loki seeks Thor out. They lie together, of course. Thor memorizes every inch of Loki’s body, trying to unlock whatever secrets he has left, memorializing the Asgardian by his touch alone. Thor wrings cries out of Loki he does not otherwise make and in turn, Loki strokes Thor in places that make him destroy the bed not with lightning, but with ice.

Afterward, they look at one another, panting, and laugh.

Some nights they do not lie together at all. They keep one another company, Thor taking counsel from Loki, Loki reading to Thor, both smiling and taking a different kind of pleasure in one another, simply talking, Thor braiding Loki’s hair and Loki showing Thor spells.

When they wake up, tangled in one another, Loki does not know if it is better to stay or to go. He fears it will break him either way.

**

Thor prepares for the war on Vanaheim. It is not that Loki is not expected to join the Jotun warriors; it is more that with a slip of his tongue and a suggestion here and there, he has convinced Laufey and Hellbindi that he would be better suited on Jotunheim. If they are all to go and get themselves killed in the pursuit of war, then who will stay and make counsel when the Vanir come back, begging for peace?

Jotun armor is not so much more than daily Jotun-wear, but there is slightly more leather to cover the soft give of flesh. In addition to the metal at his shoulders, Thor has chainmail to wear under his breastplate and leather bindings up his legs and the uppermost part of his arms. On his lower arms he wears a vambrace.

Loki helps strap his armor in, tying and tucking where necessary. Thor turns back to him, all covered, and Loki smiles.

“A pity,” he says. “Your strength lies in your naked body.”

Thor chuckles and leans forward to kiss him.

“Will you do my hair?” Thor asks.

“Yes,” Loki smiles.  
  
  
Thor settles on a chair and Loki stands above him. He loosens Thor’s hair from its leather binding. It falls like golden waves about his shoulders. It is like this in both realities; Thor, shining, unsettlingly beautiful.

“Will you—” Thor tilts his head backwards so Loki can see the red of his eyes. “Give me something of yours? To take with me?”

Loki thinks about that, runs his nails across Thor’s scalp. Thor closes his eyes with a sigh.

Loki unbraids his own hair and mutters a few words. A small section of dark hair falls onto his palm. He smiles as he weaves it into Thor’s hair. When he’s finished, the black and blond braid sits against his shoulder; a part of Thor and a part of Loki, bound together.

Loki kisses Thor’s forehead and Thor opens his eyes.  
  
  
“You look sad,” Thor says, catching Loki’s eyes in the mirror in front of them.

“I will miss you,” Loki replies.

“Not that,” Thor says. He reaches up, covers Loki’s hand on his shoulder with his own. “You seem as if on a precipice. As though you are waiting for something.”

Six, Loki thinks again. One more and then—

Then what?

He closes his eyes and rests his chin on Thor’s head.

“I do not know,” Loki says, which is the truth.

One more secret left to find and then—well, he doesn’t know.  
  
  
It could be fine, Loki thinks, as Thor lifts Ice Crusher onto his shoulder. He could stay here, half of his memories in place, guiding the Jotun, loving Thor.

It would not be the worst life he has lived by far. Laufey and Hellbindi are savages, but that is nothing a dagger in the night or a draught of death could not cure. He and Thor could sit on the throne together, rule side-by-side, in a way he never was able to in his other life.

Is that not what he has always wanted? To be significant, to take Thor’s light for his own, and share some of his with Thor in return? In a sense, it would be everything that he has ever wanted, in every life he has lived.

Would it mean as much, he thinks? To have that here, in a reality he has only just stepped into?

Loki rubs the space between his middle finger and the one next to it with a frown.  
  
He cannot help think about Thor, _his_ Thor, and what has become of him. If Loki is here, then who is Thor, there? Who is Thor, without Loki?

“You do that often,” Thor says in front of him. “Does something hurt?”

“No,” Loki replies absentmindedly. “Nervous habit, I suppose.”

“I thought maybe you had a scar between your fingers too,” Thor says with a deep laugh. “Then we could match.”

Loki freezes, thumb in that same space in between.

“What?” he asks, a bit dumbly.

“Well, between mine, I have a mark,” Thor says with a smile. “I do not know where it is from, only that I have always had it. It is in between my middle finger and the one beside it. A small scar, shaped like—”

“A crescent,” Loki’s throat is dry.

Thor does not seem to understand. He looks at Loki with a frown and shifts Ice Crusher to his other shoulder.

“You know?” Thor asks.

“No,” Loki says and then, looking down at his hand, he offers it to Thor. “I simply have one too.”  
  
  
He feels dizzy, for a moment, weighed heavy under almost certain knowledge that this—this is what he has been waiting for.

Loki looks down at Thor’s hand, twice as big as his own, and twice as calloused. He turns Thor’s hand over, looks at his palm, and then turns it back. Thor stretches his finger and there, at the same spot at Loki’s, is a small, scarred crescent.

Loki’s breath comes up short.

“It is the mark of a soul bonded to yours,” Thor says, surprising them both. Loki looks at him in wonder. “I thought it was a myth.”

“But this—” Loki says, swallowing. He looks at them again—a cut like a crescent in between the middle finger and the fourth finger on his left hand; a cut like a crescent in between the middle finger and the fourth finger on Thor’s left hand. A perfect, matching set.

“I have had this scar my entire life,” Thor murmurs. “I was told it was a defect from my birth. But—”

“A soul’s mark,” Loki says. He feels his knees shake, something deep quake in the center of his chest.

He thinks, if it has always been this way—if it has always been him and Thor, in all lives, intertwined together, loving and hating and inextricably, hopelessly bound, well, it would make sense.

Loki in every life would bind every memory, every hope, every key to this one, simple mark.

“Thor,” Loki says and his voice is raw.

Thor looks at him and it’s with a sadness so sweet it cuts to Loki’s bones.

“This is it, isn’t it?” he asks. “The last one.”

Loki would cut out his heart and give it to Thor if he but asked. But he cannot lie to him; not about this one thing.

“Yes,” he says.

“You will not be happy unless you uncover your secrets, will you?” Thor asks, sadly.

Loki swallows.

“No.”

“What will happen?” Thor says, holding Loki’s palm on top of his own. “When I touch it?”

Loki thinks of all of the spells he has learned, of all of the incantations he has memorized so close to his chest.

“I do not know, Thor,” he says.

No, that is not the truth at all. One look at Thor and it is clear Thor knows that too.

“What will happen when I touch it, Loki?” Thor asks again.

Loki closes his eyes, sadness tugging at his conscience, like tide on a beach.

“Then,” Loki says. “I will be free.”  
  
  
Thor is a Jotun and that is all wrong, but at the heart of it, at the very heart of it all, Thor is also _Thor_. And in every universe, in every iteration of Loki’s life, that means he will, at the end of the day, be the very best person Loki has ever known.

“Okay,” Thor whispers.

He presses a kiss to Loki’s forehead.

“Okay,” Thor says.

Then he presses his thumb to Loki’s soulmark.  
  
  
Loki opens his eyes, heart beating fast and erratically in his chest.

Thor looks at him expectantly, curiously.

It takes Loki a moment to realize that nothing has happened.  
  
  
It is not fair to call it disappointment, what settles into his bones; but how else to describe the feeling of anguish that breaks over him? It roots him like an anchor, threatening to drag him to sea. He presses his face to Thor’s chest, clutches to his sides, and Thor holds him, his cold hands at his back, rubbing circles soothingly into Loki’s skin there.

Loki shakes and despairs.

This is all he is now, he thinks. He is a shell of half-memories and nothing more.  
  
  
“A soulmark is deeper than skin,” Thor says into Loki’s hair. “Perhaps it is not touch that it needs, my love.”

Loki shudders and presses his face deeper into Thor’s chest.

Then he realizes that Thor is right.

He and Thor have been more than simple touch or affection. What they are and what they have been—well.

What is the saying?

Blood is thicker than water.

**

“Are you sure about this?” Loki asks, looking at Thor.

Thor, who would break Jotunheim in half for Loki.

“Cut me,” Thor says.

*

A soulmark is not a normal scar. It is not something accidental or violent. It is not the result of carving into one’s body or about flesh being torn and knitting itself back together.

A soulmark is something deeper, indeed. It is in the very blood, the very soul of two bonded.

Loki has had a soulmark in all of his existences. He was born with a soulmark here, in this universe, where he was raised a prince of Asgard and taken to be a frost giant. He was born with a soulmark there, in that universe, too, where he was born a frost giant and taken, raised to be an Asgardian.

In every life that Loki has ever lived, his soul has been bound, hopelessly, unreservedly, inextricably, to Thor’s.

And for two souls that cannot breathe without the other, it is not so much a scar or a sacrifice of skin, but something deeper. It is something given to one another. It is a branding, deep within the bones, deeper than the blood, of the two bound together.

  
Loki takes the dagger and cuts into Thor’s crescent. It bleeds, of course, and Loki takes that blood on his tongue.

Thor, in turn, takes the dagger and cuts into Loki’s crescent. It bleeds, too, and Thor takes Loki’s blood on his tongue.

They look at one another, hearts beating fast, ice and electricity and magic between them. Then Thor tugs Loki forward and kisses him.

*

The door opens behind Loki, a blinding white doorway, swirls of time and color and reality buffeting from the edges.

Thor’s red eyes are wet. Loki has never seen his brother cry before and, he thinks, he may never see it again.

“I do not have to,” Loki says suddenly. Fear grips him, and grief, and something more—something a lot like—

“You do,” Thor says. He kisses Loki again. “You are not meant for here and I will not be the one to keep you.”

“Thor,” Loki says and Thor shakes his head.

“I love you, brother,” Thor says thickly. “I love you and therefore, you must go back.”

“To what?” Loki asks and feels his fear spike in his blood. The bruising around his throat glows in the light of the doorway. He knows it all now—he remembers his entire life; Asgard, Thor, his father, Ragnarok, Thanos. He knows that he will never be forgiven there, he will never be as free nor as loved as he is here. Here, he is a blank slate, and there, well he has made his decisions and is now bound by them.

“To him,” Thor says lightly. The grief is so strong in him that Loki can feel it too, can feel it resonate from Thor’s chest. “You must go back to him. To me.”

“Thor, I cannot—” Loki says suddenly and his voice is higher. This has been a mistake. This has all been a mistake. He cannot go back, he can only stay here and—

“Go,” Thor says, firmly. “I release you, Loki. I set you free.”

He pulls Loki toward him again, kisses him with the desperation of a heart shattering to pieces. And then Thor, with love that could break entire realms, sets a hand on Loki’s chest and pushes.

****

**after.**

In ten years, it has been the same for him.

He wakes up in the morning, rolls out of bed with a groan, washes his face, avoids his reflection, prepares his breakfast, eats it, then disappears into the woods.

He lives in the woods now.

Where else is a former king to live?

**

The whole end of it is a blur to him, now. Thanos, the snap, the battle against time and lives lost to save a timeline that’s already been wiped clean. He thinks now that the only thing that had kept him together then was the pulsing adrenaline of the end of everything. He kept himself together because he had no choice.

But after—after everything had been saved, after lives had been brought back, he was still left there, alone, picking up the pieces by himself.

Everyone else had gotten what and who they needed back.

Thor was happy for them, of course. He could not have beared to see Steve Rogers looking sadder than he already was. A warrior such as himself did not deserve the pain he had lived through. Still, it was not lost to Thor that of all of the people who came back, none of them belonged to him.

Thor, he remained alone, a king without a kingdom, a god without anyone to keep him.

**

So one day, he disappears into the woods. He stays on Midgard because he has nowhere else to go. Thanos had not taken Asgard from him, Hela had. So when Thanos is reversed, Asgard is not.

What had he told Rocket?

_What more could I lose?_

Everything, as it turns out.  
  
  
Still, it is not so bad. It is not what Thor, in his youth, would have expected his life would be, but he supposes he had taken much for granted then. He’s thousands of years old now and has lived lifetimes in riches, so it is not the saddest story. He is a fallen god without a realm of his own, but he is a god who has had everything in his lifetime.

Even now, he has a house of his own, and land of his own, and even friends who come and visit when they think it has been too long since they have seen him.

He left the Avengers after all of that. It could have given him purpose, to stay with them, but he is old and he is tired.

“You got a grey streak in your hair,” Steve Rogers had said to him just last week. He had trekked all the way up to the mountains to see Thor.

“You have a ring on your finger,” Thor said with a pleased smile.

“Yeah,” Steve said and shifts his ring on said finger. “It’s been a few years, but—guess it’s been a while, Thor. Are you okay?”

Was Thor okay?

Thor smiled back, although it did not reach his eyes. No smile has, not in a very long time.

“Of course, Steve,” Thor said. “Why would I not be?”

**

He chops up wood and trades it in town for the food and necessities he needs, when he needs them. He doesn’t know what he does with the remainder of his time, really. He wanders the woods, traipses up and down the mountains. He thinks, is this what Loki felt like, all of those years? His brother would disappear to the mountains and come back with flowers growing in his hair and his green eyes alight with magic.

Thor has never had any seidr in him, not a single spark, so he was always envious when it vibrated off of Loki’s skin.

He thinks he should have told him, then.

He should have told Loki many things.  
  
  
He wipes his hands off on his jeans and picks splinters of wood out of his palms. He spends half the day picking herbs and vegetables and fruits he knows he can eat from the growth of the mountains. Loki would laugh to see him like this now. Thor had never known one plant from the other. Any time they had gone on some adventure together in nature, Thor had been an absolute disaster.

Now, among the trees and birds, in the vibrant green of the mountains, is the only place and time Thor feels the least bit sane.

He ties his long hair back and carries the fruits of his labor home.

Next to the wooden cottage stands Stormbreaker, resting against the cabin wall. Vines grow around her, up her handle. He has not had need to use her in many years.  
  
  
He comes inside, spreads the vegetables and herbs on his kitchen counter, and goes to wash his hands and face again. After a minute of consideration, he takes a shower as well, runs his old, aching body under hot water.

Ten years is nothing for an Asgardian, but Thor has been on Midgard now all this time. Perhaps his magic is leeching out of him. Maybe what makes him Asgardian and not Midgardian is leaving him at last.

He looks at himself in the mirror, forgetting to avoid eye contact—literally eye, he has since removed the extra eye that Rocket gave him—and notices that Steve had been right. His face is grizzled, blond and grey, and his hair, which has grown out again, has a thick grey streak in it too.

He frowns and considers, turning his face this way and that.

“Still handsome,” he decides. Then, hearing his own voice and startling from it, he laughs out loud.

There is no one there to hear him.  
  
  
He washes the herbs and vegetables and sets to preparing them for dinner. This, too, would have made Loki laugh. Thor, making his own dinner? Thor, cooking?

 _If mother could see you now_ , Loki would have cackled.

But neither mother, nor Loki can see him anymore. Neither can his father, nor Heimdall, nor the Warriors Three. He thinks about Sif, sometimes, about where she is, but she has not sought him out and he is too tired to seek her out.

Once, Valkyrie had come and visited him.

They had stayed up all night, drinking, and then they had fucked, simply because they could.

“Hm,” she had said after. “I’ve had better.”

Thor had laughed at that.

So had he, but he wasn’t about to tell her about the time he had nearly burnt their spaceship down because Loki had touched him so hotly.

That is a secret for him and him alone.

He wishes he would have realized earlier, the extent and nature of his feelings for Loki, but that was like wishing a garden out of dust. Useless.  
  
  
He eats his meager meal, lights all of the lanterns inside, and then goes to sit on his porch. He takes a blanket with him, because it is fast becoming cold, and a book he’s reading.

Yes, he reads now.

This, too, would have made Loki laugh.

Thor keeps it all tucked within him; all of the things he wishes Loki could see now, and how he imagines his brother would have reacted to it all.

If he misses Loki like a physical, missing limb, well—that is a secret for him and him alone too.  
  
  
Thor reads half of his book as the sky turns darker. It’s peaceful, here in the mountains, with the changing sky colors and air cooling around him. It’s some Midgardian book he reads about ancient myths, which he finds fascinating. There are gods that belong to all manners of Midgardians, not simply the ones that had sacrificed to them.

Loki would have known all about them, of course. Loki knew most things and Thor—well, he had wasted their youth chasing every fleeting thought and interest.

Thor closes the book with a heavy sigh.

He looks up at the moon as it rises and runs a hand through his greying hair. The moon, bright and white in the dark sky, is a perfect crescent.

Thor smiles. It looks just like the mark between his middle finger and the finger beside it.

He looks down at his hand, at the scar he has born his entire life. He puts his thumb against it and rubs at it absentmindedly.

Then he turns his hand and looks at the scar across his wrist—a perfect slash, thick in the middle, narrowing at the tips.

The loneliness gnaws at him, making his insides shake with the ache of it.

“I suppose I am the only one left now with this mark,” Thor says, rubbing his thumb over it. “Bearing this mark. In the whole universe.”

There used to be two, he thinks.

And now there’s only one.

  
He doesn’t hear it, in front of him, the swirling portal opening. There’s a bright, blinding light, a whirling, churning sound, and the doorway opens.

“I would not be so sure,” a familiar voice says.

Thor looks up.

 

  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [odetteandodile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile) and [calendulae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calendulae) said that readers deserve a more satisfying ending and as usual, they're right.
> 
> So something for you, readers--short, sweet, and better than anything End Game will offer us. ♥

**later.**

In ten years, it has been much the same for him. 

Thor wakes up in the morning, rolls out of bed with a groan, washes his face, avoids his reflection, prepares his breakfast, eats it, then disappears into the woods.

It doesn’t change so much now, truth be told.

He still wakes up in the morning, in his small cottage in the woods, rolls out of bed with a groan, washes his face, avoids his reflection, prepares breakfast, and then—

“Is that coffee?” a voice says behind him.

Thor closes his eyes.

He does this every time; every morning.

His heart thumps in his chest, rapidly, with loud, almost nervous thuds.

Arms snake around his waist and Thor opens his eyes.

This he does too; every time, every morning.

“Yes,” Thor says with a smile. “How else am I to get you out of bed?”

“Why are you trying to get me out of bed?” Loki mumbles, sleepily.

Unlike Thor, Loki is a late sleeper. He sleeps like an angel, but when he wakes up, it is with pillow creases on his face, dark curls all sleep-rumbled, eyes that he rubs just to come alive. Thor has watched Loki wake up like this for a year now and every morning it has warmed his heart.

“I thought you might help me today,” Thor says.

“Ha,” his brother replies, as though Thor has said something funny. “I have no desire to go and chop wood and wrestle bears, or whatever it is you do out there.”

“I gather your herbs for you, you lazy witch,” Thor retorts, with absolutely zero heat.

“My skin is very delicate,” Loki sniffs. He buries his face in Thor’s back and Thor feels overwhelmed for a moment, stands swaying on his feet. 

“I know,” Thor says with a smile, when he can manage. “I believe I left bruises all over it last night.”

“I do not know that you did a thorough job,” Loki mutters. “Do I not deserve more than one night’s attention?”

Thor snorts. He turns the stove off and turns, shifting Loki so that his face is now buried in Thor’s chest.

Loki is surprisingly soft and pliable when he wakes up. It has been one of the things Thor has learned about his brother over the past year. He has learned many things, has committed even more to memory, but this is, perhaps, his favorite.

“If you had your way, I would be giving you attention every second of every day,” Thor says.

“Yes?” his brother demands, removing his face just enough for Thor to see one defiant, bright green eye. “What of it?”

Thor could say a great many things here. Once upon a time, in their long lives, he would have retorted with sarcasm or teasing or even a jest that was particularly mean. Now, though, after everything—after absolutely everything, he has no desire to do any of that.

“Nothing,” he says, softly. “You have it. Every second of every day.”

Loki looks mollified and lifts his face for his morning kiss.

Thor, heart fluttering, leans down, presses his mouth against Loki’s.

“Ugh,” he says, pulling back. “Go brush your teeth, you heathen.”

Loki sighs, grumbling, and lets go.

“Fine,” he says. “But I want my entire breakfast prepared in exchange.”

As though Thor has not already done that.

As though Thor will not spend the rest of his life preparing Loki all of the breakfasts he could ever possibly want. 

**

Their days are soft and lazy.

It is not the thrilling end that he had once thought they would have, but here, at the end of all things, Thor does not think thrilling is what he needs. He is growing older and Loki is growing older with him. That is all he has ever wanted.

They spend time together and they spend time apart and always, at the end of the night, and often in the morning, and sometimes in the middle of the day, for no reason at all, they spread one another out, wring sweet words and soft cries and gentle moans out of each other. They show one another what it means to be loved. They memorize each other’s bodies, press memories into each other’s skin. Thor always takes his time. He kisses the rune at Loki’s collar bone and then the rest of him—every tattoo, every scar.  

He starts at his throat and works his way down.

He ends, always, with the crescent in between Loki’s fingers. His favorite scar; the mark of his soul and Loki’s, combining.

*

In time, the bruising around Loki’s throat fades. It washes away, leaves unmarked skin behind, as though it had never been there at all.

But it had been and Loki—he does not forget. He will never forget again.

  
“Let us turn it into something that is ours,” Thor says, one night. He is on his side, the sheets pooled to his bare waist. Sweat gleams on his skin, sparkles on his brow. 

He lays a hand on the place the bruise used to be.

“What do you suggest?” Loki asks, turning his head to look at his brother.

Thor looks at him as though he never has before, as though he could watch Loki time and time again, through all of their lives, and all of the lives in between. The Thor who watches him now is different than the Thor who watched him in Jotunheim and it is different than the Thor who forgot about him during their childhood.

It is an older Thor. A wiser Thor. A Thor who has lost Loki and never will, again.

“Something in ink,” Thor says with a smile. “Something permanent.”

He caresses the spot and leans forward, lays a kiss against Loki’s throat.

“Something beautiful.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> \+ Fic title based on "[Running Up That Hill](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEEXyRL0qE) (originally by Kate Bush, this version by Placebo), which is an achingly Thorki song.  
> \+ For those of you who read [Sanctify](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16498166), I SWEAR I will get around to replying to comments soon. I appreciate all comments and kudos--thank you so much! ♥  
> \+ Catch me on [spacerenegades [twitter]](https://twitter.com/spacerenegades) for more Marvel/Thorki/Stucky shenanigans!!
> 
> \+ Thank you so much for reading! I love to hear from you--so if you're so inclined, feel free to yell at me in the comments! :) Also if you're so inclined, the rebloggable Tumblr post for this fic [is here](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/post/181682667183/fic-running-up-that-hill-thorloki)! Happy New Year! ♥


End file.
